As a young girl, professor Shoko Hamano said she wanted to be an actress. Although she never took formal steps to achieve her goal, Hamano brings her dramatic abilities to the classroom instead of the stage.
Hamano, a Japanese professor and this year’s recipient of the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Teaching Award, said she uses creativity in her lesson plans. The award, created by President Trachtenberg in memory of his parents, gives an annual $1,000 prize to an outstanding undergraduate teacher.
Hamano received the award Friday afternoon at an hour-long ceremony. About 60 students, friends, professors and administrators attended.
During her acceptance speech, Hamano taught the audience about the origins of Japanese, which grew out of the Chinese and Korean languages. She also discussed the difficulties of teaching a language that is the “mirror image” of English. She said Japanese can be difficult to teach because it is written in what English speakers would see as an inverse order of words.
“Translate each phrase by reversing the order of words in your mind and then everything will be OK,” she said.
Hamano said she often hands assignments back to the wrong students, makes obvious mistakes in lecture and speaks to her students in Japanese in public, to force them to use the language.
“We use the Zen method of learning – if you do it long enough, you will get it,” she said.
Hamano said she uses role playing in class to help her students comprehend the foreign language.
“I have mastered a number of role types,” Hamano said. “For example a ghost, a news anchor, a flight attendant.”
A native of Japan, Hamano has been working at GW since 1993. She received her B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Tokyo in 1976 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropological Linguistics from the University of Florida.
Prior to coming to GW, Hamano taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and served as acting director for the Japanese Language Program at Harvard University.
“So long as we continue to improve the program, I am going to feel sorry for every graduating class because the other classes will be better off,” Hamano said. “For this, I sincerely apologize.”
Hamano’s students said they enjoy their professor’s classes because they are different from other courses.
Freshman Andrew Meyer said Hamano’s energy inspired him to continue taking the language beyond his general curriculum requirement.
“I had no idea how much I would like it,” he said.
In December, administrators asked for award nominees. About 200 professors were nominated, said Rachel Wyatt, an assistant to the executive vice president for Academic Affairs. After narrowing down the pool to 56 professors, a team of administrators reviewed the nominees’ profiles before choosing Hamano.
Hamano said she was struck that her students realized “teachers do make a conscious attempt to create a learning environment.”
“I guess I just have really good students,” she said.
