Kaoru Miyazawa is an associate professor in the PhD in Educational Studies Department of the Lesley Graduate School of Education. She received an Ed.D. from the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 2010, and was a visiting scholar at Fukushima University, Japan, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015-2016. She was a faculty member of the Education Department at Gettysburg College, PA from 2010 to 2022, where she also served as the Department Chair and Certification Officer in the PK-12 preservice program.
As a former K-12 English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, her research examines how technologies of governance, collective memories, and emotions shape the official curriculum and day-to-day teaching practices in schools. Throughout her past work on immigrant students' future aspirations in NYC and curriculum change in post-disaster Fukushima, she has explored how citizens from marginalized communities develop desires for development, and how they pursue those through schooling. Her dissertation on immigrant students' aspirations was a finalist for the Dissertation Award in the Curriculum Studies Division of the American Educational Research Association in 2011.
Her work has been published in journals and books in various disciplinary fields, ranging from the Journal of Curriculum and Theory, Girlhood Studies, Language Arts, and Harvard Educational Review. She has recently published a book entitled Risk Society and Education in Post-Disaster Fukushima (2021) from Routledge.
In addition to conducting research, she has worked with K-12 public school teachers, community organizers, and artists to implement projects to share multilingual students' voices and develop global empathy. As a scholar and an educator, she aspires to decolonize education and research by recuperating locally grounded indigenous knowledge for sustainable development and forming glocal network.