José Antonio Bowen

Dr. José Antonio Bowen has long been a pioneer in active learning and the use of technology in the classroom, including podcasts and online games, and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, USA Today, US News and World Report, PBS News Hour, and on NPR. After a distinguished career in the classroom, with teaching awards from SMU, Miami and Georgetown, and a Stanford Centennial Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1990, he has focused on helping others improve student learning. He has presented hundreds of keynotes and workshops in the US and around the world, including China, India, Japan and Italy in 2018.

His book Teaching Naked: How Moving Technologyout of your College Classroom will Improve Student Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2012) was the winner of the Ness Award for Best Book on Higher Education (2013) from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. It was followed by Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes with C. Edward Watson (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017)—called “as rich a resource…to improve students’ learning as has been written in a generation.”

His focus on a better classroom experience led to innovations as an educational leader. He led Goucher to a new streamlined general education curriculum with a focus on a new 3Rs of Relationships, Resilience and Reflection and a revitalization of the campus that focused on creating policies and spaces that would “nudge” students to do more of the work, that only they can do to learn. Resulting in a new book, A New 3Rs: Using Behavioral Science to Prepare Students for a New Learning Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press, due 2020). After twenty years of innovation educational leadership, he received the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education) from the New American Colleges and Universities in January 2018.

Areas of Expertise

• Course, curriculum, and general education redesign
• Cultures of change
• Educational research
• Faculty development
• Higher education leadership
• Institutional change