Holly Clark

My life is a delightful unfolding of synchronicities, and my introduction to IHE has been one of the most integral pieces of this marvelous journey that I’m on. I was working for EarthSave, an organization devoted to environmental sustainability and plant-based eating, when I met Dani Dennenberg at a conference where she was conducting a workshop on humane education, a term I’d never heard of. After ten minutes, I was convinced that IHE’s program was the next step on my path; within a year, I enrolled in the M.Ed. program and started on what was to be some of the most transformative and beautiful learning I had ever undertaken. 

I began the program while I was still working for EarthSave, which might have seemed like the perfect vehicle for me to implement my developing skills as an educator; however, one of the most influential lessons I learned through IHE was that all of life is interconnected, and I felt that what I was doing was somewhat disconnected from the larger community in many ways. It was my yearning to reach across some of the boundaries in the work I was doing that led me to quit my job and be an educator full-time; I felt that much of the justice work in my community was “preaching to the choir,” and I longed to figure out how to reach those who seemed most uninterested in the movement.  IHE’s ability to illustrate the interconnectedness of oppressions, and solutions, led me to the understanding that a guiding theme in my own work was to be how to inspire those who were seemingly uninterested in humane education to live more humane lives. This, I felt, would be crucial to my bigger mission of figuring out how to inspire the entire world to live more humanely! 

After many twists and turns, I was led to what has become my dream job, teaching English in a student support program at Jefferson Community College. Technically, I teach English Composition, but all my teaching is conducted through a lens of humane education and community action, with the goal of using literacy as a tool to sculpt more intentional, just, and humane lives. The majority of my students are economically disenfranchised and educationally underserved, and many of them initially say they are too overwhelmed with life to worry about social change. So working as a classroom community to lobby against mountaintop removal in Eastern Kentucky or to connect with Howard Lyman’s Mad Cowboy or Alan Durning's Stuff is an amazing experience for me. And the opening of hearts and minds that always occurs is truly breathtaking.

 
After two years of this, my curriculum has more fully integrated literacy as a means for personal and social change based on community engagement; this has led to incorporating direct action with different social justice organizations as a central part of my courses. Two goals guiding my teaching are that each student will have a better understanding of the interconnectedness of individual choices and global reality and will walk out of my class with the literacy skills and confidence to be a community organizer, in whatever capacity is meaningful to him or her. This fall, I’ve created a civic literacy collaborative with a neighboring private high school and a statewide grassroots organization, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, that focuses on participatory democracy. The goal is to bring disconnected groups together to work for community change and to inspire the students to educate each other across their race and class differences about what it means to be an engaged citizen for social change. 

 
Additionally, I’m on the board of directors of Women in Transition (WIT), a grassroots organization led by and for poor people, and one of our newest campaigns is for food justice. Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a tool, our members are engaging in community outreach with local farmer’s markets, conducting food literacy workshops, and campaigning for healthy, plant-based food in low-income neighborhoods. Our goal is to connect healthy food choices with personal agency and social change; already, the results have been dramatic! In the Spring, my students at JCC will be working with WIT on the annual Dismantling Classism Conference, whose theme will be Healthy Food is an Economic Human Right, and will engage the community in solutions for local food inequities. 

 
Through examining issues such as food justice, the restoration of voting rights for convicted felons, mountaintop removal, environmental racism, and speciesism, my students create connections between the challenges they face on a daily basis and the myriad solutions that are possible. Rhetoric and composition become tools not only for telling their own stories, but for discovering their unique and important place in the web of evolution, birthing their dreams, and crafting the plans that will bring these dreams into being. 

 
I’m eternally grateful for all the opportunities that I’ve been given, but I’m especially aware of the instrumental role IHE has played in helping me realize my own dreams. So many of us long to be a part of creating a better world but we don’t know how to do this; IHE showed me that each of us has a unique set of skills and talents to share with the world, and that we can be humane educators wherever we are in life. I start all my courses with Gandhi’s, “Be the change you wish to see,” and as I learned through IHE and as I teach my students, every single area of our lives has the potential to reflect this. Even English 101 can be all about personal and global change! But humane education doesn’t have to happen only inside a classroom; in fact, the real humane education I do usually happens when we can move beyond the classroom. (Teaching just affords me a captive audience – I’m still figuring out how to get people to flock to me on their own!) 

 
While I’m extremely happy with my current job, I have aspirations to bring IHE to my community on an even larger scale. One thing that I long for is a way to bring a more cosmological foundation to my teaching, and to education in general, so I dream of an opportunity to more directly engage students in the spiritual aspects of social change.  My current dream is to create a branch of IHE in Kentucky in which local humane education efforts become a catalyst for local, sustainable evolution while also creating space to engage a variety of faith communities. 

At this moment, I feel like I’m just beginning everything, and already life has exceeded my wildest expectations of what is even possible! It is this belief in the impossible becoming possible that I attribute to IHE, and I am continually awe-struck by the ever-expanding horizons of my life that have resulted from the heart and mind-opening education I received from the texts, experiences, and personal relationships with this incredible program.