Adam Key

Brainstormer, Care taker, Change Agent, Christian, Educator/Teacher, Filmmaker, Idea generator, Single, Student, Writer/Editor

Adam Key is a Ph.D. student in the Texas A&M Department of Communication and the Speech Instructor and Debate Coach at Lee College - Huntsville Center, the oldest and largest prison college program in Texas. Since 2011, he has been teaching speech classes to inmates at six different prisons throughout east Texas as they work to earn their Associate's degrees while incarcerated. His research has been featured at state, regional, national, and international conferences. Key is also a career debate coach, having coached students to national and international rankings at both the college and high school level over the past nine years. Key is a 4-time national champion debater and in 2012 became the youngest recipient of the International Public Debate Association's Coach of the Year award. In 2016, he began a debate program at the historic Walls Unit in Huntsville, TX that defeated Texas A&M's speech and debate team at an exhibition in October.

Teaching, particularly oppressed or at-risk populations. I have spent my career teaching in prisons, at a Title I high school on the border with Mexico, and a historically Black university with a 36% graduation rate. I have several degrees, but my students have always been my best teachers.

You should not care about what a person has done. You should care what they're doing about it.

Andragogy, Autoethnography, Critical Methods, Pedagogy, Prison Education, Rhetoric

I am an educator and a student. I have been in classes with over 1,000 convicted felons inside Texas prisons. I taught them how to speak publicly and they've taught me more than I've learned from any professor or book.

Professional wrestling. When I was 16, I started training to be a professional wrestler. I read Mick Foley's autobiography and he wrote that all aspiring pro wrestlers should go to college before they go to the WWE. It stuck and now I'm a professor.