History and language, taught where they come alive
At University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) in Asia, the classroom is rarely a classroom. It might be a battlefield site in Okinawa, a Japanese cultural festival, or the street outside a learner’s front door. For Michelle Fukuyama, PhD, and Nanako Matsumoto, the real world isn’t a supplement to learning—it’s the point of departure.
Both adjunct professors have been recognized with the 2026 Stanley J. Drazek Teaching Excellence Award, UMGC’s highest faculty honor, awarded annually to instructors for exceptional impact. The two teach different subjects and arrived at UMGC through very different paths, but share a foundational conviction: that learning sticks when it begins where learners already are—in their daily lives, in their communities, and in the places they have been asked to call home, sometimes only temporarily, thousands of miles from where they started.
Michelle Fukuyama: History you can walk through
Michele Fukuyama thought she was going to be an English teacher. Fresh out of college, she arrived in Okinawa through the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, where she spent five years developing lessons and leading her students though field trips outside the classroom walls.
But one of those experiences changed the trajectory of her career. A fieldwork study of the Battle of Okinawa opened a window onto a history she had barely known existed—complex, painful, and still visible in the landscape, the culture, and the daily lives of the people around her. That experience helped shape both her academic and professional path.
She returned to school to study museology, or museum studies, conducting oral histories with Okinawans who had grown up under American control. She then placed their testimonies in the Histreet Museum in Okinawa City. Returning to Okinawa for good, she focused her PhD dissertation on the experiences of the Okinawan domestic workers who had been employed by American military families during postwar occupation, recapturing the stories of women who had been largely written out of the historical record.
In 2016, Fukuyama joined UMGC in Asia, where she designed the curriculum for HIST 316N, History of the Ryukyu Islands, and has brought her fieldwork directly into the course. The learners in her classes, many of them servicemembers and their families living on or near U.S. military bases, encounter Okinawan history as living context, rather than as a sequence of dates and political events.
“Whether my students are new to the island, here for just a couple of years, married to an Okinawan, or even Okinawan themselves, I want them to leave the class with even more curiosity regarding the history and culture here,” Fukuyama said.
Fukuyama actively builds opportunities to enhance that curiosity. When the course covers the archaeological record of ancient Okinawa, learners visit replicas of homes from 2,000 years ago and can climb inside them. When protests make the news, learners can refer to their study of prior periods of unrest to better understand the historical context.
Fukuyama’s explicit ambition is for the course to function as a “grassroots-level tool to improve relations between Okinawans and the Americans who live here,” a goal that positions history as something with practical, relational stakes in the present instead of an abstract academic exercise.
Michelle Fukuyama, PhD Adjunct Assistant Professor
Nanako Matsumoto: Building a community of learners, one conversation at a time
Nanako Matsumoto did not choose language teaching so much as she grew into it. A native of Japan who studied in Tokyo before earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States, Matsumoto has spent more than three decades teaching Japanese and English, the last ten years at UMGC’s military-connected locations in the Tokyo/Kanagawa region of Japan.
The learners she encounters are largely members of the U.S. miliary community: servicemembers and their families who find themselves living in Japan, navigating a new language and culture while managing the pressures of military life. Matsumoto knows that world from the inside as a former military and Department of Defense spouse, having experienced firsthand what it means to build a life far from home. She brings that understanding directly into the classroom.
“Living in a new country with a new language can be daunting,” Matsumoto says. “Yet I am always encouraged when I see [learners] gain more confidence as the class progresses.”
Her approach begins before the first grammar lesson. One of the opening assignments in each of her courses asks students to share their personal goals and what they hope to gain from studying Japanese. The answers shape how she teaches the term. She adjusts her instruction toward what each learner is actually reaching for, whether that is the ability to talk to a neighbor, read a menu, or simply feel less isolated in their daily environment.
Matsumoto’s attentiveness extends beyond the curriculum. She organizes cultural events on and off campus, connects students to language testing resources, and offers guidance on life in Japan, going well beyond anything that could be found in a textbook. Having pursued graduate studies in sociolinguistics at Sophia University, where she began her studies as an undergraduate, she continues to develop her teaching even as she practices it.
Technology, Matsumoto acknowledges, has made the logistics of daily life in a foreign country easier. But she is skeptical of what it doesn’t provide. “I believe it cannot match the satisfaction gained from one’s own ability to communicate in another language,” she said. It’s that conviction that drives her to make every lesson feel like a genuine step toward that satisfaction, not just a requirement to fulfill.
Nanako Matsumoto Adjunct Associate Professor
Together, Fukuyama and Matsumoto represent something central to what UMGC in Asia does best. The learners they teach are adults navigating demanding and often isolating experiences: stationed far from home, adapting to unfamiliar environments, managing responsibilities that have nothing to do with their coursework. Both professors take those circumstances seriously, not as obstacles to work around but as the actual texture of their students’ lives, and the starting point for everything they teach.
Read about more UMGC faculty members recognized by students for their impact.