Kenji Hakuta's Home Page
I presently teach at Stanford University, where I have been on the faculty since 1989, except for 3 years (2003-2006) when I had the exciting opportunity to help start the University of California, Merced as its founding Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Humaniities and Arts. At Stanford, I hold an endowed chair as the Lee L. Jacks Professor. My areas of teaching and research are in the education of English Language Learners, education policy and practice, and statistics.
My scholarly interests are bilingualism and second language acquisition, and my policy interests are in improving educational opportunities for language minority students. I am at a phase in my career when I am more into actions than traditional scholarship. I currrently spend a lot of time in schools looking for interesting collaborations and activities that can directly impact the lives of students.
My latest pet creation is a website, WordSift at http://www.wordsift.com which integrates different web tools for teachers to visualize vocabulary in texts. Try it out, by copying and pasting text into it, and see what it does! It was officially launched on January 16, 2009, and we have already received a lot of great responses (of course, I am biased).
I also recently worked with an ad hoc group of researchers (especially with Diane August and Jennifer O'Day) to develop a set of recommendations on the stimulus bill (known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) and how it can most effectively address the needs of English Language Learners. Click here for the documents.
Other stuff: upon returning to Stanford from Merced, I was asked to co-chair the faculty steering committee of the university's K-12 Education initiative. This is part of a $4.3 billion fundraising campaign to engage the campus in addressing real world problems, including the environment, health, and international security. The K-12 Education Initiative at Stanford is a university-wide effort to address the problems of teachers, leadership, and policy. As a former dean, I guess I am most excited about the institutional implications of the initiative -- that is to say, how a university such as Stanford might organize itself to engage with a social problem by working across organizational boundaries.
I am also co-directing, with my good friend and colleague Guadalupe Valdés, a set of on-line teacher resources and video materials to help in the professional development of teachers of language minority students -- a project that I started with Elsa Schirling Billings (now at San Diego State University) and Sue Baker (now at Sacramento State University) over 10 years ago. This year, we will have about 400 teachers throughout California enrolled in our courses and receiving their state CLAD/CTEL English Learner state certification through our program. We are working hard to grow this on-line development work in opportunistic directions.
This year, I accepted the responsibility of serving as the faculty advisor to Stanford's charter high school in East Palo Alto, a school that was started through my colleague Linda Darling-Hammond's effort. Anyone familiar with Stanford will know that East Palo Alto is on the other side of the economic scale from Palo Alto. This work is enormously challenging.
Outside Stanford, I am working with the San Francisco Unified School District as part of the Strategic Educational Research Partnership (SERP), a long-term effort to bring district personnel and researchers to help develop a knowledge- and data-driven organization. The district has identified middle school math and science as a priority for SERP, and that brings along with it the language and literacy needed to be successful. There are lots of meetings, but I do not mind logging time on CalTrain rather than United Airlines!
I have scaled back enormously in my external commitments to boards and national committees. It has taken me over 20 years since moving to California to realize that the east coast is a long ways away, and that travel consumes enormous amounts of time. This rearrangement of priorities has afforded me more time to work locally in California. An added bonus has been some extra time to enjoy the natural beauty of California, especially the Sierra Nevada range. I am starting to develop some creative education projects with the rock climbing community.
Please click on the topics below for details. For those who have visited my website previously, you will notice that I have decided to move back to a minimalist design to bring attention to the information content. I am also trimming back on content. Click here to get back to my old website.
This page was last updated March 18, 2009