Kumiko Sakai - Educational Director
Kumiko was born in Yokohama, Japan. From 1986 to 1996, Kumiko worked as an ESL/Bilingual teacher in the Birmingham School District in World Lake, Michigan, where she taught Japanese elementary and middle school students. In 1997, Kumiko moved to North Carolina and began teaching at Greensboro Montessori School where she worked for 18 years. Kumiko specializes in language development for children in a multilingual environment. Kumiko enjoys helping her students to discover their own abilities and possibilities through a learner-centered pedagogy that promotes active citizenship in which students choose to take a self-governing role in the many divergent communities of their lives.
Yuki Aratake - Marketing Director
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Yuki has lived in Chapel Hill since 1994. Yuki has been interested in English/Japanese language education since she was a university student and has taught English and Japanese as a volunteer. In graduate school, Yuki studied language education and bilingual education. Since 1994, Yuki has been teaching Japanese at a university. At the same time, Yuki has seen the need for foreign language education from an early age which has led her to focus on Japanese language education in elementary, junior high, and high schools in recent years. Yuki approaches Japanese language education through both linguistics and cultural competence.
Makiko Border - Operational Director
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Makiko has lived in NC since 2006 where she and her husband adopted school-aged siblings. Desiring to contribute to their educations, Makiko went back to school where she became interested in the mechanisms and processes of language acquisition and understood how acquiring a language is both biologically- and socially- based. Makiko acquired M.A. in foreign language teaching at MSU and has been teaching Japanese at universities. In recognizing the growingly diverse and dynamic nature of communication, Makiko aims to provide an authentic learning context that is meaningful for the learners based on their goals and interests.