Peter Gottovi earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. After a taking a break from academia while pursuing a career in music as a drummer/ percussionist recording artist and live performer in New York City, Peter went back to school earning an Honors Master of Arts in Secondary English Education at The City University of New York. During and for a few years after that degree, Peter joined the New York City Teaching Fellows Organization and Americorps program as a teacher teaching English, history, percussion, and music technology at a public school in one of New York City’s most troubled neighborhoods, located in the South Bronx. Peter left that position in 2008, when he relocated to Atenas, Costa Rica and began his work at New Summit Academy.

During his Masters work in New York, Peter became inspired by such educational theorists as Lev Vygotsky and Howard Gardner. Working in the South Bronx, it became his mission to try to teach in Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development” through Gardner’s different “Multiple Intelligences”. Early on, it became clear to him that the incredible advances in technology at the time were not being utilized anywhere near to their potential in a vast majority of the classrooms he observed. His principal at the time (now a superintendent for the Department of Education of New York City) asked him to become a lead teacher in technology integration at their school. She gave him the autonomy to write his own curriculum for and integrate his own unique “Literacy through Music and Cultural History” program, which featured a recording studio he built at the school. She wanted him to incorporate his knowledge and skill from his career in music with his English and history curriculum. His students loved the new approach to literacy and history, which allowed them to pen and record their own lyric-centered compositions, in addition to learning much culture and history behind the music they loved. The work inspired his master’s thesis, which was a human study on the impact of technology integration into instruction on his students.

Once at New Summit Academy, Peter immediately got to work building a recording studio as well as bringing down and also acquiring various musical instruments in order to provide the equipment for an energetic, if unorthodox technology-centered music program. But his integration of technology into instruction did not stop there. As the history teacher, Peter has worked tirelessly in order to collect and integrate a large assortment of rich, multi-media content and technology-based, multiple intelligence-delivered products and project/ problem-based research into the standards-based curriculum he developed. It is not unusual that you can hear a group of students “rocking out” in the rancho or in a recording session in the studio while creating new music. It is also not atypical to see a group of students engaged in the creation of a film, a podcast, a song, or the design of a website about an historical event, based on a research assignment. Now, with the integration of iPad technology, Peter is exploring new music apps, such as Real Book for iPad in order to take full advantage of the technology in order to add jazz and blues improvisation to the NSA music program. In addition to his teaching and music collaboration, Peter brings his 35 years of surfing and ocean swimming experience in order to help facilitate surfing instruction, lifeguarding, and trip planning and logistics for NSA’s, student-led Surf Club.