Renée Boey ’00

A School Grows in Hong Kong

Renée Boey ’00 founded Bloom KKCA Academy to teach a love of learning with an eye toward the future.

BY KATE DUNLOP

In a parallel universe, Renée Boey ’00 is an esteemed academic, an expert in Renaissance literature who’s published prolifically and is a well-known, in-demand speaker in her area of expertise.

Instead, Boey is an esteemed educator who has pursued a passion for teaching — a passion whose seeds were sown as a student at St. Paul’s School working with refugees in Concord, nurtured as a volunteer teacher in the community while a student at Harvard, shaped by formal teaching experience after graduate studies at Cambridge University, and now have grown into the Bloom KKCA Academy, the school she founded and leads in Hong Kong.

All too aware of how fast the world is changing and how slowly schools typically do, Boey envisioned a school that would prepare students to create their own futures. After intensive research that included visits to nearly three dozen schools, she designed her own future-oriented version with the input of experienced educators, engineers and entrepreneurs to go beyond what she calls the traditional mindset and emphasize positive education, project-based learning and compassionate creativity. Combining strong academics with vocational education, the school leans on well-being and character education, bilingualism and multiculturalism, and collaborative innovation to achieve its goals. Bloom, a bilingual primary school (Mandarin and English, though Cantonese is the local language), opened in September 2021, despite COVID-19, and is flourishing, with plans to launch its secondary program this summer. 

Situated in a densely populated neighborhood that serves as an extended classroom beyond Bloom’s building, the nonprofit private school is unlike most of its kind in Hong Kong: 25% of the students are on some form of financial aid.

“It’s important to expose people at a young age to different perspectives, even within the same culture,” Boey says. “That, to me, is central to the mission of education. I want to do things with love.”

And with a variety of enrichment classes in addition to its rigorous academic offerings, such as a farm-to-table program, Boey has brought her educational philosophy to life.

“I believe in learning by doing, but even more than that, I believe in respecting the individuality of the student as a human; when you can connect as a person first, then you can talk about other things and unleash the creative side and the human values,” she says. “So even though we’re a school of innovation and we talk about technology a lot, the tech serves the human purposes, which are about promoting peace and intercultural awareness, and understanding, which has become so important. I really believe that my own education is the reason I feel so positive about [humankind], and I do think if you have positive experiences in your formative years, you have a deeper trust for that possibility.”

Boey points to her years at St. Paul’s School as one of her own early positive experiences, and even today, a poster of the School hangs in her office. “St. Paul’s is one of the main reasons I’m in education,” she says. “I felt intellectually challenged there, and I still keep in touch with my teachers. They really care for you as a person; it’s not a transactional relationship, but very deep. The comments they wrote made everything about much more than grades, and that shaped my view of education. Every adult that I interacted with at SPS taught me something and really cared about me, and I try to be that type of a teacher.”

As for that other life in education?

I was at Cambridge, and it was a wonderful experience, but it is quite isolated. I could see how it would be so comfortable to settle down into academia and a life of writing and publishing but … while I love teaching literature and very traditional text, I realized I wanted to help kids bridge the gap between academic learning and what the real world would demand of them and what they cared about,” she says. “I wanted to do work that had more direct impact. I believe a good education can transform individual lives and through them, the world.”