The Sasakawa Fellowship Fund offers Short Term Fellowships to Japan for Japanese Language or Japanese Studies teachers, or for others in a position to share their findings with these teachers. The amount of the award will be $5,000. Half will be paid soon after notification of the success of an application. The second half will be paid on receipt of evidence that the fellowship holder has taken steps to share their findings or resources with the Japanese language teaching community. Applicants are responsible for making their own arrangements for the visit.

Following is a list of Short Term Fellowships that have been approved since the project was introduced in 2003:

In 2003, Janis Maidment worked with Jenny Short at the Japanese Language Centre in Urawa, creating web pages of activities to accompany the materials Jenny was writing for beginners to Year 11 students of Japanese. These activities are available in the Language Revision page of the NZAJLT website (link here). As well as developing the activities herself, Janis was responsible for taking photos to accompany the material. She also used her time in Japan to advance plans for the ‘Kiwi Tsunami award’ under which …..

Chris Morris, then Principal of Chartwell School in Wellington, the world’s only Japanese Joint-venture school, received a Short Term Fellowship for a study tour to Japan in September-October 2003. The purpose of his trip was to gain a better understanding of the Japanese education system in order to be able to cater more effectively for the Japanese national students at his own school. He was committed also to passing on his findings to other non Japanese staff at Chartwell for the same reason and to fellow principals.

Glenda Koefoed photographed the kanji which appear in the NZQA prescription lists relating to Years 11 and 12 of ‘Japanese in NZ curriculum’ and produced from these a set of power point presentations to illustrate real life contexts for these kanji. These, and an accompanying set of activity worksheets, are available to teachers through the NZAJLT website (this will take you to the homepage of the students’ site. Click ‘joining NZAJLT’ to see how to subscribe to NZAJLT and therefore be able to access many excellent resources developed for and by NZ teachers of Japanese). They can be used either as an independent revision tool for individual students or a resource for use with classes.

The Hay family (Dad, Mum and two teenagers) packed up their house in Keri Keri and travelled to Japan for a year in 2005/2006. They had had little prior experience of or preconceptions about Japan and wanted to expose themselves to a completely different culture and lifestyle for a year. They planned to set up an interactive website, on which the two children would post their observations as ‘Kiwi Kids in Japan’ and invite feedback and discussion via email from invited classes in New Zealand. In the event it proved impossible to set up the website in the time frame proposed, and instead, on their return, the children gave power point presentations and performed a dance they had learnt, to 10 different schools in the Keri Keri area. Their power point, with many fascinating photos showing aspects of Japanese way of living that had struck them as very different to the Kiwi way that had been for them the ‘norm’ until that year, is available for viewing here. This may be of interest to Social Studies teachers teaching a unit on Japan, as well as Japanese language teachers. To view a shortened version of their PowerPoint in PDF please click here (1.38Mb).

Aukje Both spent time in Japan in 2006 taking photos of katakana in situ which she the used to produce the resource ‘katakana in context’, an interactive CDROM for use in the classroom. This resource is available to teachers through the NZAJLT website. Aukje has presented about her resource at the Sasakawa Conference 2007 in Christchurch and the CASTEL (Computer assisted Learning) Conference in Hawaii in July 2007. At both conferences Aukje presented a very compelling argument for teaching katakana before hiragana. A short description of the paper she presented at the Hawaii conference, with photos, is available here.

Further information and the application form are available here