Ms. Vicki Stroud Gonterman
Social Studies Teacher
Gibbs Magnet School of International Studies and Foreign Languages
Little Rock, Arkansas
Ms. Vicki Stroud Gonterman has been a social studies teacher (both elementary and secondary) for 26 years and has taught international studies at Gibbs Magnet School of International Studies and Foreign Languages in Little Rock, Arkansas for 19 years. Currently she teaches second graders about Japan, their classroom nation, and fourth and fifth graders about Japanese Americans. Ms. Gonterman began developing lessons and collecting materials on Japan in 1986 when she began hosting teachers from Japan in her home and classroom. In 1991, she was selected as an exchange teacher to Sapporo, Japan through the Metropolitan Jr. Chamber of Commerce of Little Rock and the Sapporo Jr. Chamber of Commerce and worked on all subsequent exchanges finding participants and host families. The summer before the exchange, she was accepted for participation in the Mid-South–Japan in the Schools Project funded by the U.S.-Japan Foundation which included a summer study at the Asian Studies Center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a study tour of Japan in the summer of 1992.
Following her study tour across Honshu, Ms. Gonterman created an elementary unit on Japan Studies and helped to integrate Japan Studies in all second grade classrooms in the Little Rock School District. In 1993, Ms. Gonterman participated in an intense summer study of Japanese literature, film, and culture at California State University in Sacramento funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She became a charter board member and officer of the Japan-America Society of Arkansas in 1994 and now serves as its first female president of the board. In 2003, Ms. Gonterman was accepted by the Japanese American National Museum and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for a two-year project entitled “Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in World War II Arkansas.” After a study at the museum in Los Angeles, she helped write and disseminate a state-wide elementary curriculum for teaching about the internment experience at the two WWII relocation camps located in Arkansas. The project culminated in a national conference and reunion of internees. Perhaps the most well-known Arkansas internee, George Takei (actor and activist), spoke with her fifth grade international studies students.
As a recipient of the National Peace Corps Association’s Global TeachNet Global Education Award for 2005 and the recipient of the Arkansas Fulbright International Educator Award in 1988, Ms. Gonterman has presented at numerous local, district, and state level workshops and state and national conferences, many on Japan Studies. In addition to her teacher exchange and study tour in Japan, she has also been an exchange teacher in Bremen, Germany (1987), and participated in the UALR program entitled “Bringing Mexico to Arkansas Schools” which included a study at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in Mexico in 2001.
Ms. Gonterman plans to use grant funds to form a sister-school relationship that includes various exchanges with an elementary school in Tsu City, Japan and to implement a Japan Evening in Little Rock.