Professor’s Youth Leading Change Initiative Participating in Remake Learning Days
Youth Leading Change (YLC), an initiative launched by Associate Education Professor Dr. Temple Lovelace, works to provide learning spaces in Allegheny County schools that enable youth organizing to help “plant the seeds” of youth and teachers as agents of change in education transformation.
Next week, YLC is hosting two events in conjunction with the city’s annual Remake Learning Days celebration designed to showcase Pittsburgh as a recognized national leader in innovative teaching and learning.
YLC will host its second annual Youth Leading Change Summit on Thursday, May 18, at 8:30 a.m. at the Jeron X. Grayson Community Center located at 1852 Enoch Street in Pittsburgh. Open to students, teachers and principals, the daylong event provides the opportunity for 6th to 12th graders to present projects including documentaries, digital art, essays, spoken word ad live expressions. Speakers will host sessions on topics such as youth journalism, the micro-enterprise of hip-hop and virtual reality for justice, and others.
This year, YLC will welcome XQ: The Super School Project, which will engage students in their mobile multimedia exhibit that challenges students to “rethink high school” and showcases how education has changed both here and abroad.
That same evening, YLC will host The Power of Our Story, featuring award-winning teacher and acclaimed spoken word poet Clint Smith III. Currently working on his Ph.D. in education at Harvard University, Smith’s research interests include mass incarceration, sociology of race and the history of U.S. inequality. He received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; was a Cave Canem Fellow; a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow and served as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State.
Smith’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian and American Poetry Review. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and World Poetry Slam Finalist, and he published Counting Descent, a collection of poetry, in 2016. A highly sought speaker, he has spoken at the 2015 TED Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, the U.S. Department of Education and the Aspen Summit on Inequality and Opportunity, among others.
“Clint Smith is an educator and an artist who believes wholeheartedly in the power of creativity to understand each other and understand, specifically, teacher-student relationships,” explained Lovelace. “Today, there’s a lot of pressure around achievement because we’re preparing for accountability as measured by state test scores. An often forgotten measure of success in education is relationship. If we infuse poetry, writing, hip-hop or the visual arts into our pedagogy—that enables us to connect on a deeper level and have more amazing learning experiences across all content areas.”
The Power of Our Story, which is free and open to the public, will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Elsie H. Hillman Auditorium at the Kaufmann Center located at 1825 Centre Ave.