New York City Honors English Doctoral Student
June 17, 2013
Ph.D. candidate Damion Clark received a Big Apple Award: Recognizing Teacher Excellence in New York City for his work teaching eleventh and twelfth grade students.
By Natalie Kornicks
Damion Clark, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, received a Big Apple Award: Recognizing Teacher Excellence in New York City for his work with eleventh and twelfth graders.
Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott recognized 11 winners of the inaugural Big Apple Awards in a ceremony on Wednesday, June 12.
The goal of this award program is to recognize the city’s best teachers and support a system-wide conversation about excellence in the classroom. All award recipients receive a $3,500 classroom grant to deepen their work with students. The Big Apple Awards are made possible through generous support from The Fund for Public Schools, as well as Lincoln Center, which sponsored the Lincoln Center Arts Teacher Award recipient. The Mayor and Chancellor Walcott honored the 11 Big Apple Award recipients in a ceremony at Gracie Mansion.
Clark, an 11th and 12th grade English language arts teacher at Democracy Prep Charter High School in Harlem, Manhattan has been teaching in the New York City public schools while completing his dissertation.
His experiences teaching at Maryland prepared him to help his students for college-level English courses. His daily Socratic seminars are genuine exchanges of intellectual discourse—Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the cultural legacy of African imperialism, and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” were just a few of the connections made by his students in a recent class. This type of rich debate and attention to text pays off: All of his juniors passed the Regents Exam last year (with 60 perecent scoring an 80 or higher), and all are on track this year as seniors to excel on the English AP exam. After only two years at Democracy Prep, Clark’s influence extends beyond the classroom—as a faculty sponsor for the Latino Caucus, as the chair of the school’s literary magazine and as the English Department Chair.
“Our teachers rave about how he has transformed their teaching," Clark's principal said.