By Peter Chipman, OCW Digital Publication Specialist and OCW Educator Assistant

Welcome News

We were delighted to hear that Masami Ikeda-Lamm is one of six educators in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences to receive this year’s James A. and Ruth Levitan Teaching Award. This is the second time she has received this award, having won it for the first time in 2016. It’s no news to us that Ikeda-Lamm is dedicated to her teaching; over the years, she has been instructor or co-instructor for eight courses or supplemental resources published on OpenCourseWare, and she recently agreed to participate in OCW’s Educator project as well, joining her colleagues in answering questions on how they teach 21G.501 Japanese I. Now she has also shared her thoughts on the teaching of 21G.502 Japanese II.

At the Instructor Insights page for 21G.502, Ikeda-Lamm explains in detail how she encourages students in that course to develop an active command of Japanese (“Ideally, all the mechanical drills with rote memorization should be done outside of class as preparation for drill sessions so that the class time can be spent utilizing the language in actual communication”). She also describes how having already established a sense of community helped the class to remain cohesive through the dislocations arising from the COVID-19 pandemic (“We all felt uncertain and disconnected, yet this sense of belonging helped everyone remain engaged in the new virtual learning space”).

We know that Ikeda-Lamm’s students are grateful for her dedication to their learning, and we at OCW are likewise grateful for her generosity in sharing her course materials and insights with the world.

Instructor Insights from Past Award Winners

Of course, Masami Ikeda-Lamm isn’t the only winner of the Levitan award to have shared teaching insights with the world through MIT OpenCourseWare’s Educator project. Listed below are the others from past years.

2020

Emily Richmond Pollock:

2019

M. Amah Edoh:

2018

Sharian Lewitt:

2015

Takako Aikawa:

Min-Min Liang:

Haohsiang Liao:

2013

David Autor:

David Custer:

Margarita Ribas Groeger:

Chappell Lawson:

2012

Arthur Bahr:

2011

Teresa Neff: