There are few individuals out there who can list both “two-time TED speaker” and “doctoral student at Harvard University” on their resume. Clint Smith is one of those people—though when you ask him about his work, he doesn’t immediately voice those accolades. Rather, he talks about his writings, and the time he’s spent teaching poetry to incarcerated men in Massachusetts.

There’s also something else he brings up—his beliefs, specifically his concerns that educators across the U.S. aren’t adequately teaching about the history of inequality and how it has come to manifest itself in this country. Smith is not one for silence (he delivered a TED talk about the “danger of silence” in 2014, in fact) and has used digital venues including Twitter to encourage others to speak up and recognize how history shapes the present.

But what are Smith’s thoughts about the role that technology plays in the ways that students navigate the world, online and offline? And when it comes to Twitter, are users merely 'preaching to the choir,” or is it truly an effective medium for changing minds? EdSurge had the opportunity to speak with Smith this week on the EdSurge On Air podcast to get his thoughts.