Bowen Kelley

Bowen Kelley is a high school History teacher and recent graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE)’s Master’s in Teaching & Teacher Leadership with a concentration in Identity, Power, and Justice in Education. Bowen spent his youth in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with the exception of his high school career at a Connecticut boarding school and a series of transformative life and global learning experiences on the African Continent. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill with majors in African Studies and French, Bowen moved between the worlds of undergraduate study abroad and college access before accepting a fellowship at African Leadership Academy (ALA) in South Africa. First as a fellow and later as a full-time faculty member, Bowen spent five years at ALA advising, coaching basketball, and teaching in one of the world’s only high school-level African Studies departments, before eventually returning to the US in 2020 determined to design and deliver immersive, interdisciplinary, relevant, and reflection-heavy African Studies and Non-Eurocentric History experiences for audiences closer to home: diverse American high school classrooms. Thus far, Bowen has pursued this project on the campuses of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, where he taught/developed a variety of World History courses and African Studies electives including his pride and joy, a Media Studies-meets-African History course entitled “Africa Through the Lens” that examines how photography, film, and social media have been used to tell stories of the Continent from different vantage points throughout history. Looking ahead, in addition to creating perspective-shifting African and Global South History experiences in his classroom at The Park School of Baltimore, Bowen is seeking to extend his impact by communing with and coaching colleagues hoping to sensitively and self-awarely bring non-Eurocentric perspectives into their syllabi and by designing and facilitating increasingly critical, humanizing, and reciprocal global and experiential learning experiences on the African Continent. 

Reimagining secondary level study abroad in Africa via Pan-African Voices and Photovoice, a research project led by Bowen Kelley