Dr. Junko Yamamoto

Dr. Yamamoto is such a personable individual and is very passionate about what she teaches and about helping the students be successful. She currently teaches instructional technology and world languages teaching methodology, and supervises fifteen student teachers. She loves being able to see student teachers using the information that they learned in her classes in an effective way. She explained how she is so proud that her student teachers are able to bridge theory and practice and actually apply into their teaching methods. 

She also shared that it’s important when the students use what she taught them as well as other professors and use all of the information, theories and practices all together. Yamamoto said that the “new project this year is taking some students enrolled in the instructional technology class to a local school district.” The students who sign up to go the district will get to see what kind of technology the teachers and students are using. The other project is a professional development grant that she is working on. Ten faculty members attended a four day workshop with her included. The objective is to have some of the people who teach Spanish and French become certified oral proficiency interview testers. The rationale of this is that Spanish and French Education majors must be able to speak at a certain level in order to be recommended for a teacher certificate. She explained that it is important that the teacher candidates in French or Spanish can formulate a paragraph in their target language. 

A student story that Yamamoto shared was when she saw a social studies education major student using their own knowledge of the Spanish language to tutor a non-native speaker because the student came from Central America. She explained that this student was able to use visuals and simplified English and sometimes cues in Spanish to be able to tutor him one on one. She said that her student “was able to help him understand.” 

In Dr. Yamamoto’s free time she likes to paint, crochet, knit, garden and sing. She enjoys listening to music and since it’s her job to teach the authentic cultures of Spanish and French she binge watches Spanish and French movies. One of the things that Yamamoto said that she appreciated about SRU is that “it is a teaching university and if you go to a non-teaching university you may have graduate student teaching undergraduate students. You don’t see anything like that here. You have someone who is qualified to teach the subject.” Another reason she appreciates SRU “is it’s a nice, safe community and once you got here you don’t have to worry about crime or violence as much as studying at some other universities.” She also shared that the parking is so much better at SRU than other college’s especially inner city colleges.

 Yamamoto wanted to become a teacher at the college level because she loves having the academic freedom and the opportunity to start a project and to have creativity in teaching and completing the projects. If she could have one superpower in the world it would be to control her eating and her tongue because sometimes she eats things that she regrets eating and says things that she regrets saying.