Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa is an educator, researcher, and therapist-in-training. Believing that education is a way to improve and heal society and individuals, she uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand pressing and emerging issues in society and education. For instance, she has conducted research about immigrant girls’ nostalgia and their future aspirations in the US, children’s cosmopolitan identity through their reading and writing, as well as the impact of trauma in Fukushima, Japan, following a nuclear disaster. As a high school English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher and teacher-educator, she has also collaborated with classroom teachers, community organizations, and artists internationally to implement project-based learning. Her interest in art, healing, and community-building led her most recently to study Expressive Arts Therapy (ExAT). She is interested in bringing the principles and techniques of ExAT into classrooms, especially to engage students and teachers in difficult conversations in classrooms to restore community and humanity.