Fort Hayes Arts & Academic High School Japanese teacher Tracy Imamura fulfills her passion for languages and culture both in and out of the classroom. When the pandemic interrupted international travel, it halted a long-running exchange program between Imamura’s students and their peers at Asahikawa Jitsugyo High School in Hokkaido, Japan.
Not content to let it fall by the wayside, Imamura worked to get the program up and running again. Students and a teacher from Hokkaido visited Columbus in March, and some of Imamura’s students are traveling to Japan next year.
Reviving the program required a lot of effort—educating and organizing new host families, arranging transportation and planning visits to local sights—which Imamura did in addition to her regular teaching duties, says Kristen Skiles, a French teacher at Fort Hayes who nominated Imamura for the award. “All our kids were enthralled with the experience,” says Skiles. “It was beautiful to see it all come together.”
“I just love languages and different cultures,” says Imamura, who was named the high school winner in the Columbus Parent/Columbus Monthly 2024 Teachers of the Year awards. In addition to teaching Japanese at Fort Hayes and AIMS Arts Impact Middle School, she’s learning Spanish, speaks French and participates in a French book club online. “Whatever I do seems to be about language or a culture.”
When Imamura travels to Japan to visit her husband Yoichi’s family, she’s also on the lookout for materials to use in her classroom. It’s one more way to motivate students and keep them—and herself—current with Japanese culture and new vocabulary.
Connecting with students and bringing a piece of the world to them that they might not otherwise know or see in person is her goal, she says. “I tell my students, ‘I don’t care what country you go to—it doesn’t have to be Japan—but you have to, at some point, travel overseas and see how people live, see the different cultures,’ ” she says. “I think everyone should do that around the world. I think that would help us have a better understanding of each other.”
Imamura’s interest in world cultures was sparked in high school when her family, who lived in Springfield, hosted a French foreign exchange student. “We are, 35 years later, still friends,” Imamura, 53, says. “I just saw her in June, and she’s coming to visit me in November.”
For the 2024 Teachers of the Year awards (the 10th year for the recognition program), readers nominated K-12 teachers online from March 7 to April 5. Educators at public and private schools throughout the Columbus region were nominated by current and former students, parents, administrators, colleagues and family members. Our editorial staffs reviewed all the submissions, did some independent research and narrowed the list to 15 finalists. Readers voted May 24 through June 19 to determine the three winners.
Imamura, who lives in Dublin with her husband and sons, Zachary and Maxwell, graduated from Ohio State University with bachelor’s degrees in international relations and Japanese in 1995 and returned for a master’s degree in education in 2001. She taught English in Japan for four years after spending a year there during college.
Imamura is one among just a handful of Japanese teachers in Central Ohio. According to the Ohio Department of Education, only 38 districts or community schools offer the language. Of the 320,472 students studying a language other than English in 2022-23, only 1,420 took Japanese—a far cry from the 212,532 who took Spanish.
“It’s a unique lane and she’s so good,” says Milton Ruffin, principal/director of the Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center. “She creates such an enthusiasm.”
Ruffin says Imamura is “a teacher leader” who shares with the whole staff. “Just a real asset. The kind of teacher you want on your team.”
“Tracy has always been at the forefront of, ‘Let’s try something new,’ ” says Skiles.
In addition to the exchange program, Imamura takes advantage of opportunities organized by the Japan-America Society of Central Ohio, including its annual Ohio Japan Bowl quiz competition, which Fort Hayes hosted in February. “That’s exciting because they get to meet other students from around the state who are studying Japanese like they are,” she says. “We practice for that and use some of that in the classroom.”
Her students also participate in the Japanese National Honor Society and a national competition to design New Year’s cards (nengajo).
“She uses a lot of fun technology when she’s teaching,” says Ruffin, as well as interactive “bell ringer” warm-up questions and games with alphabet songs and rap songs in Japanese. “She’s committed to giving kids on-ramps to a language that’s kind of complicated.”
“I feel fortunate because I’m doing my dream job,” says Imamura.
This story is from the Columbus Parent section in the September 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.
