Mr. John Frank
Social Studies Teacher
Center Grove High School
Greenwood, Indiana
Mr. John Frank is a social studies teacher at Center Grove High School in Greenwood, Indiana where he has taught Advanced Placement United States History, World History, and Geography since 1987. Previously, he taught for ten years at two other Indianapolis area schools, Roncalli High School and Greenwood Middle School.
Mr. Frank’s first academic contacts with Japan began during his undergraduate years at Indiana University. He studied about East Asia under the instruction of Dr. Philip West, focusing on the subject of the Cold War in East Asia. Since the 1970’s he has enthusiastically taught about Japan and East Asia in high school and middle school classrooms.
In 1992 Mr. Frank participated in a six-week Fulbright-Hays study tour to Japan, led by Earlham College Professor Charles Yates. During that tour he initiated exchanges between two Japanese transplant auto parts manufacturers and his own Indiana community and school. Additionally during the study-tour, he wrote a series of educational columns about Japan for his local newspaper and finished the tour with a hike to the summit of Mt. Fuji.
Throughout the 1990s Mr. Frank assisted the growth of his school’s Japanese language program and established in his community a conversational English language class for employees of a local Japanese business. He also served on the board of the Learning and Teaching about Japan Program, a State-funded initiative to introduce and support Japanese language instruction in Indiana schools. During these years his family hosted a year-long a JALEX language assistant assigned to his high school and a troupe of Japanese koto performers.
In 2002, three years after attending the first National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) seminar for teachers offered in Indiana, he participated in the first summer teacher Study Tour to Japan and Korea, sponsored by the East Asian Studies Center of Indiana University. For six subsequent summers, Mr. Frank was “Curriculum Consultant” for that center’s study tours to Japan/Korea or China. In this position he administratively supported Dr. Anne Prescott and others tour leaders. Also, he assisted 130 teachers from several Midwestern and Southern states develop and implement classroom lesson plans and community outreach activities, based upon their study tour experiences. For the 2010 Study Tour to China, in addition to a serving as curriculum consultant, he was the study tour leader, successfully directing twenty teachers, faculty expert Dr. Richard Bohr, and a graduate student assistant through a twenty-day tour of China. Also during these same years, Mr. Frank acted as the K-12 outreach curriculum consultant for Indiana University’s East Asian Studies Center, evaluating East Asian literature seminar teacher lessons, developing curriculum materials for the Center’s semi-annual K-12 East Asian Connection newsletter, and assisted NCTA Teaching about Asia seminar leaders with their participant’s curriculum implementation plans.
On his own, John Frank has traveled throughout Japan on several occasions, walking a section of the historic Nakasendo Highway in Nagano Prefecture and studied topics of academic interest in Hokkaido and Kyushu. He hopes to one day return to Shikoku and complete the 88 Temple Pilgrimage. In addition to his travels in Japan, he has also toured China and Korea on several occasions and completed trips to the Philippines and Vietnam.
Mr. Frank takes particular satisfaction in the fact that a number of his former students have gone on to university study and professions associated with Japan. Currently, his former students include a high school Japanese language teacher, a member of The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET), and several former pupils currently enrolled in university programs related to the study of Japan and Japanese language.