Khephra Owl : Critical Language Scholarship
Khephra Owl (’25, Educational Sciences) will be traveling to Okayama, Japan to study Japanese. She grew up watching Ghibli movies such as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, which led her to studying various aspects of Japanese culture, such as Zen Buddhism, Shintoism, and Japanese ghost stories. In 2023, she studied abroad in Kyoto, Japan through UCEAP and discovered several stark contrasts between US and Japanese cultures, which showed her the value of learning from each other in areas such as self-expression and honoring tradition. As a transfer student, Khephra spent two years tutoring Japanese in community college and became interested in improving Japanese learning materials to better address the needs of adult learners. This has led to her researching Japanese pedagogy for the past two years, which she will continue in graduate school. In the future, she hopes to write a new Japanese textbook and pursue a career in which she can continue advocating for multilingual education in the United States.
