Mr. Clarke has been a proud teacher for eighteen years, and a Speech Arts instructor at BASA for more than a decade. With a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English Literature, and extensive training in both rhetoric and critical thinking skills, as an instructor, Mr. Clarke aims to instill in his students a passion for learning and a desire to hone their minds. By training in speech arts, students develop the ability not only to speak more clearly, but to think more clearly as well. He believes that there is no part of our lives that is not improved with facility in speaking, whether socializing, debating or persuading, teaching or learning, working with others or even simply trying to identify and develop our own opinions and thoughts, we are made better with training in Speech Arts. For this reason, in his classroom, Mr. Clarke tends to emphasize rhetorical and improvisational performance skills, as well as the development of critical thinking abilities that will serve students throughout their lives.

As BASA’s head graphic designer, Mr. Clarke also takes special joy in working with creatively-minded students, visual thinkers and young artists. He recognizes the impact of presentation, and therefore extends his lessons to include such considerations, be it how to create an effective slide deck for a speech, how to creatively use stage space, physical expression, and other visual aspects of performance, or simply how the way we dress or hold our bodies can make a huge difference to the perceptions of an audience.

Mr. Clarke believes in Speech Arts because he has seen what it can do. He has watched the shyest students discover the power of their own voice and explode with personality, the tiniest students with the smallest voices fill the room with their words and capture everyone’s attention and imagination, and nervousness and anxiety transformed into self-expression and self-confidence on stage.