This year, Miami Country Day welcomes Dr. Kelvin Sealey as our new Head of Humanities. With a long history in education, he comes most recently from St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, with understandings and wisdom that will definitely benefit MCDS. Dr. Sealey plans on bringing “a change in classes we [the faculty] teach, a greater variety of courses including medieval European history, Russian literature and even Abraham Lincoln” with him, surely changing the system and interest levels in the classes to come.

One’s workspace usually says a lot about a person and that is true for Dr. Sealey. Located at the end of the hall on the second floor, his office is filled wall to wall with books. This reveals the truth that he has spent many years acquiring knowledge, through a variety of work including work with the United Nations and co-founding the Film and Education Research Academy (FERA) at Columbia University, an “academic research unit that generated information about the use of film in education.” THe work he did there, with his co-founder John Broughton, unveiled the idea of studying film, breaking down the different sounds and ideas, and popular culture, that various movies present to the viewer and led to several books, including Film, Politics & Education: Cinematic Pedagogy Across the Disciplines. This does not even begin to describe his vast accomplishments.

When asked to describe his style of teaching in one word, “inquisitive” captured it. Some students agree. “The questions that he asks us to answer really force us to think and really analyze the text we are reading,” Sophomore Julieta Feldman explains.

As for the aforementioned work with the United Nations, Dr. Sealey had an interesting opportunity about a decade ago. Having a father from Panama and a mother from Grenada, Sealey says that when a friend of the family, who was also an ambassador for the UN, approached him about consulting on his mission of educating “smaller island states” on danger and calamities, he said yes. These dangers and calamities included speaking about the effects that would soon come about because of climate change. He has seen how his work has paid off because, “ten years later [after his mission] we see decimation of The Antilles by massive hurricanes because of climate change.”