In Peru, at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion, Mr. Nakasone was a member of the faculty committee to design an integrated curriculum around the natural sciences to train future elementary school teachers. Mr. Nakasone taught the first Physics for Elementary School Teachers class which was the foundation for the rest of the science integrated curriculum.

Sophisticated grasp of a subject area and recent experience in public schools: During ten years Mr. Nakasone has been teaching experimental physics to adolescents and children trying to find the earliest possible age at which they can begin to grasp fundamental physical principles like gravitational, magnetic, and electric fields. The first years Mr. Nakasone did his work in Peru. He started teaching to seniors in high school and then year after year he went down to the freshmen level. Then he has continued teaching physics to elementary school students in Grants Pass Oregon. He plans to continue his project at still lower levels in elementary school, then connect his findings to the preparation of elementary school teachers.

Previous supervisory experience with student teachers or beginning teachers: Mr. Nakasone has supervised student teaching during many years at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion in Peru. Mr. Nakasone was appointed Director of the student teaching program in 1988, as such he had three experimental schools under his office, the University's Student Teaching Committee and hundreds of student teachers. He designed unique programs that involved members of the community, production centers, schools, public and private institutions and the student teaching program.

Experience with multicultural education: Mr. Nakasone has experience in teaching students of diverse cultural, racial and academic backgrounds in Peru and in the United States. His graduate work here gave him the opportunity to interact and start friendships with nationals of diverse countries, many of those friends are working in universities all over the world. Mr. Nakasone corresponds with many professionals who came to the U.S. as LASPAU scholars and are now practically running the university system in Latin America.

In 1973-74 and 1978-79, Mr. Nakasone worked as assistant leader to groups of 24 students from Lewis and Clark College who went to study in Peru during one semester. These two rich experiences have given him a unique understanding of a multicultural education. For the first group of students assisted Dr. Vance Savage with the Latin American Literature class.  For the second group Mr. Nakasone had to teach Spanish 201 and Spanish 301. In both groups he had to teach Peruvian culture and the current political conditions. When organizing those trips, Mr. Nakasone established homestays with andean families in very rural areas in the Peruvian Andes, one in Huancayo, other in Calca, Cusco, and a last one in Trujillo. Those Lewis and Clark students had the opportunity to interact with the forgotten cultures of South America. Because of his mother's family background he was able to organize those homestays; and because of his father's japanese background he was well related to the japanese-peruvian community which helped him organize the academic part of those programs in urban areas like Trujillo and Lima. Raul Nakasone has a very strong commitment to continuing organizing these kind of programs to prepare the teachers of the future, he has taken groups of Evergreen students to do part of their teacher education in Perú where they teach basic science, fundamentals of appropriate technology, arts, music, sports, English language, and some of them base their Master projects on these experiences.

Raul Nakasone has taught Spanish to American college students. He has designed his classes with the idea of involving people of different ages in search for the native cultures of South America through the Spanish language. He also taught Spanish at Rogue Community College, his class was designed in such a way that his wife Sonia and three children Heissen, Fumie and Alice, who are also native Spanish speakers, assisted him in the language laboratory part of the course.

Mr. Nakasone's mastery of the Spanish and English language and his knowledge of both cultures: the Latin American and American, his training as a teacher of teachers and his background in Math and Sciences gives him a lot of possibilities to be involved in different core programs at TESC.

Philosophy and cultural foundations curriculum: For many years Mr. Nakasone has been the director of the Centro de Energia Solar y Tecnologia Apropiada (Solar Energy and Appropriate Technology Information Center) at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion in Peru. Mr. Nakasone has tried to disseminate knowledge about appropriate technology to the adult population but he says this was a wrong idea; instead he proposes to make this a part of the rural school's curriculum.  He has proposed a special curriculum for the rural elementary schools in Peru based in the teaching of fundamental physics principles and the use of appropriate technology in the villages. The main goal for this is to cut the migration of rural populations to the already overpopulated urban areas and to give pride to the andean culture, science and technology. This effort could be connected to rescuing pre-columbian technology in rural areas in Latin America. Mr. Nakasone is hoping to make this project a reality through an international education network.

In sum, Mr. Nakasone's education and training, receipt of teaching awards and scholarships, commitment to advancement in his research projects, and promise as an effective team teacher in an interdisciplinary, multicultural setting clearly made him the most qualified candidate of all those who applied for this position at TESC in 1991. His qualifications in each of the domains required for the Teacher Education position are outstanding.
Every summer he does a lot of volunteer work in Peru doing workshops and short courses in Education, he practices a constructivist approach when he teaches, and works hard to become a Freirian teacher.

Raul's most important Pedagogical Experiment
To create a Freirian Environment like not even Paulo Freire himself had the opportunity to build.
After several years of experience in Evergreen, Raul became part of an Ideal Teaching Team. As with ideal teams, this is something that just happens, several educators with similar philosophies and similar interests just happened to meet and started working towards the same ideal. We did not have to make this decision, it was already on its way with each one of us and then, when we met, everything else started to fall in place and without much discussion the project launched itself.

Why so many great ideas in education never took place? Socrates, Tagore, Dewey, Freire, Gardner, Vigotsky, and many others had already written proposing changes in education, but those changes were never widely implemented even though in a few cases there were experiments that after a few years were abandoned. Individually, each one of us has been trying to answer this question, and I am sure, this is what has brought us together.

Our Faculty Dream Team, without even having a conversation about it, had put together the following ingredients:
- Evergreen is an institution dedicated to offer an alternative education at the college level. This means that faculty are not only expected but also encouraged to do experiments in curriculum development, instruction and assessment.
- Students choose to come to Evergreen because they are looking for different approaches to education. In many ways, these students are looking for an opportunity to really rescue their learner's natural skills they were born with but lost some by attending classes at traditional school settings.
- At TESC there is already a Twenty Year Vision program proposed by former Native American Faculty. The themes of which deal with concepts like: community, history, recognition, respect, reconciliation, heritage, family...etc. which really focus on what it means to be human and what it means to be a part of nature and what it means to find harmony between the two. These NAS programs were taught using a Native American approach to education which involves many progressive ideas in education.
- There is an institutional commitment in Evergreen to offer a student-centered approach to education which is backed up by five focii in teaching and learning and a set of expectations for our graduates.
- There is also a search for strategies to make teaching in Evergreen a sustainable profession.
- There is a faculty team (us) willing to put together all these ingredients and create the Freirian environment.

Now, this Ideal Team is in the process of creating the Ideal teaching/learning environment, the Freirian environment.

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