Kenji Hakuta's Home Page
I teach at Stanford University in the School of Education, where I have been on the faculty since 1989, except for three years (2003-2006) when I moved to the Central Valley to help start the University of California, Merced as its founding Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. That was a fun and exciting experience, and the university is well on its way to becoming a big presence in the Central Valley. Back "at the farm" as they say at Stanford, I hold an endowed chair as the Lee L. Jacks Professor (when I left to go to Merced, I held the Vida Jacks Chair, so my thanks to the Jacks family!). My areas of teaching and research are in the education of English Language Learners, second language acquisition, education policy and practice, and statistics.
My scholarly inquiry is focused on the areas of bilingualism and second language acquisition, and my policy interest is in improving educational opportunities for language minority students. I also have an quirky policy interest in how the research infrastructure can be improved to support good education research, an acquired taste that I developed which chairing the policy board the the U.S. Department of Education as well as serving on the board of the Spencer Foundation. I am at a phase in my career when I am more into actions than traditional scholarship -- what helps schools, teaching, training of future scholars to do work that is directly relevant to improving education. I currrently spend a lot of time in schools looking for interesting collaborations and activities that can directly impact the lives of students.
I am increasingly trying to make my work more web-enabled, so that I can eventually fade into etherspace, hang out in the mountains (see my SacredRok organization below) yet continue to contribute after I retire from active duty as long as there is internet access. That drives my passion to create tools such as WordSift as a tool that can be readily passed from one teacher to another. I also am proud of the on-line presence that I've created (with my good colleague Guadalupe Valdés) around ELL resources for teachers and educational leaders -- check out our website http://ellib.stanford.edu/. I'm communicating more and more through webinars, rather than getting on planes (I think that makes for a smaller carbon footprint -- at least that's my excuse for turning down most requests that involve travel).
Please click on the topics below for details. For those who have visited my website in the past, you will notice that I am using a minimalist design to bring attention to the information content. My wife thinks its ugly, but let me know what you think. I am also trimming back on content on the philosophy that less is more. Click here to get back to my old website.
This page was last updated August 12, 2011