00:04Hey guys I am sitting here parked in a Toyota RAV4 in Harlem and I'm gonna meet
00:10up with Valencia Clay. She is a teacher and an activist based in Baltimore and
00:15she is changing lives. Topic, sentence, main idea, very good. You got it. Don't
00:21question yourself. You know what you're doing. Valencia is from Harlem and she's
00:25gonna show me around her hood a little bit. Hey! Hey girl! Hey! How are you? It's so good to
00:31see you. It's cute right? The sunroof gets so much light it's crazy like it's it's really dope in here.
00:38So where's the first stop? Where are we headed? Let's go back to my old school. Okay to your old
00:42school. Alright let's get it popping. Okay. So tell me a little bit about what made you want to be
00:48a teacher. When I was five my teacher said you know what do you want to be when you grow
00:53up and I said teacher. When you
00:54were five? So how did you develop your teaching style? By becoming who I needed. I needed unconditional love. Yeah
01:02that's so real. Patience, understanding. What made you start taking video and posting video of your lessons? We would attend
01:11professional development sessions and during the sessions we would watch videos to learn how to do you know different reading
01:19strategies. The feedback from some of the other teachers was that
01:23the students don't look like ours so our kids can't do that. And so I started trying to make my
01:28own videos for our students who don't get to see themselves. They may struggle more with figuring out what they
01:36love about themselves.
01:37And that's why representation matters so much. Let's talk about your book. Soundless Cries Don't Lead to Healing. It was
01:44about people using it in order to have their own introspective outlook on what was going on in the world.
01:51So many people of color were being murdered. People were saying so many things. There's a lot of noise. Yeah
01:57but they weren't teaching. Yeah. You have such a high social media profile and I'm sure your students know that.
02:04You know what I mean? But like how are you still maintaining you know your position as an educator? I
02:11cannot be out here trying to get clout. I have to actually teach. Like I was never the one to
02:16hold a bottle of pictures once I became a teacher. Now if you try to pull up the college
02:20archives. Honey that's different. So how do you bridge the gap between education and activism? There shouldn't be a gap
02:29between education and activism. It is imperative that we remember that the system was created to make sure that people
02:35stay exactly where they are.
02:36One of the things that I really want to start researching is how do we motivate, intrinsically motivate children who
02:44appear to be totally unmotivated.
02:48My whiteboard, my smartboard used to be chalkboard but that's my picket time.
02:54Yeah. You know like my classroom is the march.
