Yoshimi Yamagata Aoyagi (K-12 category)
Yuko Prefume (Post-secondary category)
Please join us congratulating this year’s AATJ Teacher Award recipients, Yoshimi Yamagata Aoyagi of Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina, and Yuko Prefume of Baylor University. The AATJ Teacher Awards recognize outstanding teachers who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, advocacy, and leadership in Japanese education both locally and nationally. AATJ presented the awards to the winners at the AATJ Awards Luncheon during the ACTFL Annual Convention held in Nashville on Saturday, November 18, 2017.
Yoshimi Yamagata Aoyagi, Chapel Hill High School
Aoyagi sensei has been teaching Japanese for three decades, in both Japan and the United States, at all levels of instruction. She also serves on the boards of directors for several organizations dedicated to international education. In 2009 she took over the program at Chapel Hill HIgh School, and set about expanding it. She established exchange programs for high school students in which they attend classes and other programs at Nagoya University, and inspired many students to continue their study of Japanese and to seek careers in international education and other related fields.
Yuko Prefume, Baylor University
Prefume sensei has been teaching Japanese at Baylor University for 12 years. She has also been an innovator in the field. Both at Baylor and at AATJ and other state- and national-level conferences, she has given presentations on her use of service learning, flipped-classroom formats, and technology. She was an organizer of the Japan-Texas Business Forum, working with Baylor’s McBride Center for International Business. She designed a multi-year community service learning project in which her students collaborated with Tohoku University students to work with communities that continue to be affectcs by the 2011 tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region, as part of a study abroad program. She has been an active member and officer of the Japanese Teachers Association of Texas (JTAT).
