In October of 2012, Sarah Kay found herself in Spain where she was invited as a guest of honor at the International Baccalaureate’s Regional Conference to present a keynote address on the “Culture of Learning.”
Her voice is soft as she embraces the onlookers with all the charm her bright eyes and a contagious smile can muster.
“This is my first time in Madrid,” she explained. “It’s been very exciting in my few brief moments of free time to get to wander around and try to explore a new city.”
Sarah is a lifelong poet. Having grown up in the heart of New York City, she has been writing poetry ever since she was a little girl. When she was 14, a childhood friend introduced her to spoken word poetry in a way she can only describe as “divine intervention.” A few weeks later, Sarah participated in her first poetry slam, which had a dramatic impact on her life.
When it was all said and done, she exited the stage shaking. Applause echoed it’s way from the performance hall to backstage. There, she ran into a stranger.
“Hey, I really felt that,” said a nameless towering girl whom Sarah had never met before.
This was a breakthrough. The first moment Sarah realized how influential poetry could be for an audience, as well as for the poet. She remembers thinking: “There might be a stranger in the room who found some truth in my words and it made sense to her and her own life; and that to a fourteen-year-old girl was remarkable.”
She never looked back. Sarah eventually found her way to the Bowery Poetry Club on the lower east side of Manhattan. She was the youngest person there and was introduced to a collection poets and poetry she proudly admits inspires much of her work today.
She was encouraged to bring the art form to her high school. Here, she made the second breakthrough, with a successful attempt to introduce what she called Project Voice. It was an organization for high school students to express themselves through the platform of spoken word poetry. It has been years since Sarah completed high school, and the organization is still running strong.
When she entered college, she continued introducing spoken word poetry to local high schools near her campus. After presenting at her first public high school, she realized her upbringing was different. There was no such thing as uniformity when it came to experience. She realized these teenagers were experiencing obstacles she never had to think about as a teenager. She realized they needed a channel to express it.
“These students, perhaps more than anybody else, were going to need to know how to be able to tell their own stories in their own words,” she said.
It was time to share her gifts with the world and she made it a goal to reach out to as many schools as she could with an extension to Project Voice she started just a few years prior. This, she claims, was the third breakthrough.
Eventually, word spread and her poetry started opening up more opportunities. In 2011, she was invited to a Ted Conference where she delivered a poem that was filmed and posted to YouTube. It went viral and currently boasts over three and a half million views online.
The Ted Talk was the reason she was invited to Spain. At an earlier conference, Sarah spoke of feeling inferior to fellow poets who had presented before her; she thought she was out of her league. Sarah was intimidated, but managed to perform the poem she was invited to deliver and met an overwhelming positive response from the audience.
“I realized I would often have no control over the how, or the where, or the what,” she said. “That people’s opinions of me are always going to change. The best that I can do is know why I do what I do.”
This was the next breakthrough.
As she closed her presentation, Sarah addressed the audience of international educators directly. She spoke about how influential mentors in her life have been to her, as well as how important it is to her to have been called a mentor by her students. She used the opportunity to reiterate the importance of breakthroughs, this time in the classroom.
She explains how students can grow through a series of accidental breakthroughs that may allow educators to grow in the process where ideas and thoughts may be surprisingly intuitive and fruitful for those exploring them. What breakthroughs should teachers value? Where should teachers find the balance?
The only way students will learn that is to lead by example; this is, as Sarah put it, the final breakthrough. As educators, teachers should be open to the idea that breakthroughs can open doors for students because it allows them to think outside the box. Students have acknowledged that it is liberating, and can ultimately have a lasting effect that goes beyond a lesson learned from a book.
“Now, believe it or not, I actually don’t like speaking for long periods of time. It makes me very nervous, and so, with your permission, I would like to take a break from talking for a little while and perform a poem instead…which is an entirely different thing.”
With that Sarah’s address had concluded, leaving her revelations toward breakthroughs and poetry to resonate in the minds of those who listened to her. Sarah’s story is a living testimony to her vocation as an educator. Time will tell if innovations in the teaching field, such as poetry, will reap their rewards. All it takes is a breakthrough.
(To watch Sarah’s full keynote address please click here.) http://www.kaysarahsera.com/videos#video_about-bits-ibomadrid