“We are so committed to the American exceptionalism, we suppress

the stories that make us look unexceptional. Humans are messy, and we have a responsibility to foster spaces for students to wrestle with complexity.”

Inspirational speech from the opening keynote speaker, Clint Smith, at the TESOL 2021 Convention & English Language Expo.

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Being a teacher has never simply been about pedagogy or lesson plans. Teachers are in a unique position to help their students understand that the state of the world is not an inevitability, and that we shouldn’t accept it as such. They can help their students understand that the inequality we see across the world was created and constructed — and thus it can be deconstructed and reconstructed to build something better, something more just. In this talk Clint provides teachers with the framework and the tools to approach these conversations in their schools — encouraging them to use their classrooms as spaces of transformation to help students dream of building a better world.

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Clint Smith is staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Clint has received fellowships from New America, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He currently teaches writing and literature at the DC Central Detention Facility. His debut nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed, which explores how different historical sites reckon with — or fail to reckon with — their relationship to the history of slavery, will be published by Little, Brown in June 2021. He received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.