Ms. Lori Snyder

History Teacher
Longmeadow High School
Longmeadow, Massachusetts

Ms. Lori A. Snyder is currently a history teacher at Longmeadow High School in Longmeadow, Massachusetts where she has taught Asian Studies, World History and United States History since 1996. During that time she has served as district social studies coordinator, department chair as well as the East Asia Club Advisor.

Ms. Snyder’s academic interest in Japan began during her undergraduate years at Hamilton College. She studied East Asian history under the instruction of Professors Miriam Silverberg and Thomas A. Wilson. Her primary area of historical interest was the work of the famous Kokugaku scholar, Motoori Norinaga. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she was awarded the Edwin B. Lee Award in Asian History and became a Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET) participant in Mie-Prefecture, 1992-1994.

Ms. Snyder’s experiences as a JET influenced her decision to become a history teacher in the U.S. and to work to foster relationships between American and Japanese youth. Since her arrival at Longmeadow H.S., she has established the East Asia Club for students who share interest in the region. She brought a first group of Longmeadow students to Hokkaido, Japan in 1997 to attend the Pacific Education Conference. She created a student exchange program with a sister school in Yangzhou, China in 2003 and brought the first group of students there in 2004. In 2007, inspired by spending a summer at Beloit College learning Japanese under Dartmouth Professor Mayumi Ishida, she created an exchange program between Longmeadow and Takikawa City, Japan. She has led three additional student exchange trips to Japan since 2008. In order to support these programs, Ms. Snyder has written and received grants totaling over $15,000 from both the Freeman Foundation and the Longmeadow Excellence in Education Foundation.

To keep her knowledge of East Asia current, Ms. Snyder has participated in numerous national teacher institutes such as PIER at Yale University, an NEH at the College of the Holy Cross, Global Outreach Center, Clark University, Five College Center for East Asian Studies and Teaching East Asia (TEA) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has conducted numerous in-service programs and professional growth courses to her fellow colleagues at the high school and at the district level. In addition, she has been a board member of the Massachusetts-Hokkaido Association for the past 8 years and is currently involved in planning a 25th anniversary celebration for 2015.

2015 will mark the tenth anniversary of the Longmeadow-Takikawa Exchange Program. Ms. Snyder is excited to use the grant money to offer student scholarships and to provide three new teachers the opportunity to visit Takikawa during the summer of that year. She hopes that by introducing more teachers to Japan that they will be touched by the experience and will devote their time and energy to helping sustain the exchange program well into the future.

At the back wall of her classroom is a wishing well with a proverb that states, “The frog at the bottom of the well cannot see the great ocean”. Each year the well is covered with origami frogs representing the senior students in her Asian Studies class. It is her mission to expose her students to a world larger than Longmeadow through their study of Asia.