Growing up in a culturally diverse part of Torrance, California, speaking Japanese with his parents, Naotaro “Nari” Kato ’21 noticed that high schools in richer, whiter parts of the community would send far more students to Ivy League schools than his own did. “People would say to me, ‘You deserve to go to a better school,’ which made me upset,” he says. “I think my high school was very good, but still I questioned how communities only miles apart could be so different.”
That sparked his desire to become a teacher “in order to help close that gap,” says Kato, who earned his bachelor’s in education studies this year and will stay at Brown to pursue a master’s in teaching math next year. “Many teachers helped me get to where I am. Activism and policy and reform are valid, but I’m interested in the role of teaching to create social equity.”
It’s something he’s thrown himself into at Brown “tirelessly,” according to a praise-filled statement from Brown President Christina H. Paxson that celebrated Kato winning a Newman Civic Fellows Award. In his role as a Bonner Community Fellow at the Swearer Center, Kato has spent more than 1,000 hours teaching English to 100 adult language learners at two local organizations, English for Action and English to Speakers of Other Language (ESOL). “I felt like I was supporting adults just like my parents, so it didn’t feel super new to me,” he says of his learners.
His teaching style doesn’t include rote recitations of conjugations. “We ask them what they want to learn and respond to those needs, creating a lesson plan from scratch,” he says. “So if someone wants to learn more about communicating at the supermarket, we’ll focus on that.” He starts by teaching learners how to say “I like...”, “I need...”, and “I want…”
As Paxson’s statement points out, there’s nothing one-directional about Kato’s teaching style. “I’ve learned more from my learners than I’ve been able to teach,” he says. “They bring in stories that are funny, adventurous, heartbreaking.” One learner told him about getting to the U.S. via “La Bestia,” the notoriously dangerous freight trains that desperate Central American migrants board to carry them across Mexico to the U.S. border.
When COVID pushed Brown students from campus last year, Kato created about two dozen short, funny instructional videos on YouTube that he sent to his learners via WhatsApp. “But they circulated beyond my learners,” he says, “which made me think about how to use tech to teach ESOL to a bigger audience.”
While pursuing an MAT, he’ll be teaching math at a Providence or Central Falls high school. After that? “I definitely want to keep teaching at least a few years in Rhode Island, because people here have been extremely compassionate to me and I want to pay back,” he says. After that, he’s headed back home to Torrance to keep teaching.—T. M.
SOURCE
https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2021-06-22/emerging-victorious