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Clay David is a motivational facilitator and keynote speaker who energizes, stimulates and inspires faculty to think in imaginative, innovative and resourceful ways. Clay facilitates staff development workshops on such topics as Re-energizing the Classroom, Creating Community with Faculty and Classified Staff, Teaching At-Risk Students, and Enhancing Student Motivation to Complete Courses Successfully. Clay maintains a very high retention rate with his students by employing:
- Working across the curriculum - Making a workable master plan for the students, working with all disciplines, their job, child care, emotional nourishment and educational nourishment within the community of the college and refueling and counseling nourishment through the college/support group and spiritual community.
- A whole-person concept.
- Community creation - Creating a classroom community for students who do not have a community to help them achieve success. By pairing up in small groups and creating healthy family, instructors can prepare students to work in small groups in cross-cultural communication which will enhance job/college skills and maintain accountability.
- Role playing - Helping at-risk students find healthy roles/characters to emulate that have successfully completed college. Giving the student new roles to play.
- Retention - Refusing to let students fall through the cracks by teaching new ways of being accessible with unmotivated students via video, teaching with life long plans, a real-world, tough-love look at education. Clay also facilitates workshops on How to Start Distance Education in Your Curriculum, How to Teach on Television, and Homophobia in the Workplace.
Clay has been the department chair of drama at a northern California community college since 1994 where he pioneered a benevolent theatre program based on the cultural needs and social reconciliation of the community. Plays are Afro/Latino/Asian centric and performances raise a college/community consciousness of areas that are plagued in this microcosm of the San Francisco Bay area. Past topics for the theatre program include single motherhood, gender warfare, AIDS, gay and lesbian issues, homelessness, racism, gangs, incest, anorexia, and Stop Starvation Imagery Campaign.
Clay assumes appropriate department chair duties, participating in curriculum development to maintain the highest possible level of instruction that develops students' awareness of and their responsibility in a global community. Clay teaches theatre appreciation, technical theatre, acting, directing and movement. He also pioneered distance education for drama and acting, and directing for film on CD-ROM.
Prior to his experience at the community college, David spent two years with the Los Angeles cultural affairs department as an instructor of peace and self-esteem. He directed and choreographed "Coming Together", a choreo-poem workshop program developed as a component of "Rebuild L. A.," which included exercises in positive affirmations, improvisational explorations, and personal expansions. Clay also counseled in the L. A. County Probation Department, Juvenile Hall Youth Services.
Earlier, Clay spent four years at a Hollywood high school, where he served as English department chair and counselor. He taught freshman to senior-level English courses, honors seminars, introduction to drama, journalism and current events. He also wrote grant and scholarship proposals and counseled students in college admissions, achieving 100 percent college acceptance levels. He also organized the Teaching Tolerance Program, the Armenian Tutorial Project, the Armenian Orphanage
Fund and an Alcohol Abuse Program.
Clay spent three years at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he was instructor of acting and scene study. He taught students greater potential as creative instruments and liberated conventional methods by incorporating methods of organic movement explorations utilizing rhythm, animal essences, energy, music, and transcendental and transpersonal technique. He initiated a program where students were introduced to key acting industry contacts (SAG, AEA, and AFTRA representatives). He also served as advisor to many projects and coached directing and writing for film/TV majors.
Clay spent three years at the University of Connecticut as an instructor of acting, oral interpretation and opera scene study. He employed organic and positive acting methodologies; and designed and directed the "Titanic Acting and Self-Discovery through Archetypes, Myths, and Images Workshop." He also directed public relations and publicity for the theatre department, and coached for URTA, SETC, and NETC auditions.
At the University of Southwestern Louisiana, David coached forensic speech and debate, and wrote and edited selections for the American Forensic Association and the National Forensic League. He coached 29 students, of whom 7 ranked in the Top Ten nationally.
Clay developed and produced a 20 series video-distance education class for theatre appreciation that is Bay-centric and addresses the needs of a multicultural classroom. He also developed and produced an interactive CD-ROM on "Acting and Directing for Video."
Clay wrote and produced a number of plays, including Da Cajun Swamp Romp!, Victoria Frankenstein, and Give Me Liberty-Give Me Death-Give Me Something! which were produced as a benevolent social reconciliation series at the Magnolia Playhouse in Hollywood and a community college Multicultural Performing Arts Center. The Phantom of the Opera, and The Count of Monte Cristo was produced by the Great American Melodrama and the Vaudeville Melodrama Express.
Clay earned his MFA in acting from the University of Connecticut in 1989. He studied with an emphasis in directing and oral interpretation. Clay assisted Jean Sabatine, author of Movement for the Actor; Jerry Rojo, visionary of Environmental Theatre; Valerie Schor, IPA Voice and Diction Dialects; and Michael Montel, Directing Faculty, New York University.
He earned his BA in theatre from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1986, where he minored in music, English, and public relations/mass communications.
Clay received certification of period movement and voice from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in 1988. He also took courses at several community colleges in racism in America, African-American politics, multi-racial interpersonal communications, African-American drama, and a weeklong distance education seminar on video conferencing.
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