How I Did It

In the late 1980s, when volunteer Keri Gelenian returned from his term in the Peace Corps, he brought home with him an expansive take on education—and life. Teaching in the far-off African country as a primer course for his career prepared him for his current vocation as a professor at Humboldt State University in California.

Gelenian’s path is becoming a popular one among recent college graduates and professionals that are setting their sites on the education field. The global Peace Corps plan is an attractive one, because it encompasses more geography than Teach For America (TFA), another non-profit organization that filled 3,700 educational positions in low-income communities countrywide last year.

“The Peace Corps was an invaluable experience for me as an educator, and I think that I did a good job teaching in Kenya,” Gelenian says. “My Peace Corps experience really prepared me for everything I’ve done since.”

According to Allison Price, the director of communications for the Peace Corps, the government-run, American volunteer program has served 200,000 citizens in 139 countries since 1961. By living and working in developing countries, educators have promoted AIDS research and environmental preservation and disseminated knowledge about information technology and business development.

Of all Peace Corps volunteers, 35 percent are educators, making them the largest group in the organization, Price says. Students, teachers, parents, and community members integrate health education and ecological awareness into English, math, and science classes. Volunteers work in curriculum and materials development and conduct teacher-training sessions in conversational English, methodology, and academic subjects.

In the Peace Corps’s online resource for teachers, some of the past luminaries are highlighted: Thomas Gouttierre, the dean of international studies and programs and director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha (who served in Afghanistan from 1965 to 1967); James Lyons Sr., Maryland secretary of higher education (an Ecuador volunteer from 1966 to 1967); and Joyce Neu, the team leader for a new United Nations standby team of mediation experts and the founding executive director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice (a teacher in Senegal, Africa, from 1972 to 1974).

Gelenian’s credentials have also burgeoned since his Peace Corps years. He became an early graduate of the Peace Corps’ Columbia University Teachers College Fellows/USA program, which placed returned volunteers in New York public schools as full-time teachers and gave them tuition breaks on master’s degrees.

“We were paid by the New York City Board of Education, and I taught at Taft High School in the Bronx and earned an M.A. in teaching English to speakers of other languages at the same time, over two years,” Gelenian says. “I was very lucky, and I couldn’t have done that had I not been in the Peace Corps.”

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