Dr. Hitomi Oketani completed her doctorate degree (Recipient of a Government of Canada Award for Graduate Studies in Canada) at Department of Curriculum (Multilingual Education) of Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE)/University of Toronto, Canada, supervised by Dr. Jim Cummins; M.A. (Teaching Japanese as a Foreign/Second Language) from Osaka University of Foreign Studies (current Osaka University, Japan) and M.Ed. (Heritage Language Education) from OISE/University of Toronto. Previously, she taught at various institutions including Himeji Vietnamese Refugee Center, Japan; University of Toronto, Canada; Kokugo Kyoushitsu Japanese Heritage School, Canada.

She is the recipient of the 1997 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Competition Award from the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) in the U.S. (title: Subtractive to Additive Bilinguality: A study of relations among bilinguality, academic achievement and socio-psychological factors in post-war second-generation Japanese-Canadian youths).

She served as Board Member and Vice-President of the Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education for more than a decade. She also served as International Researcher of "Interdisciplinary Study on Learning Japanese and the Reality of Language Life of Foreign Permanent Residents in Japan" Project at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo) in Japan, during 2007-2012 including her residency as a research fellow at the Institute. Her current services include Academic Advisory Committee Chair at Hinoki International School, Michigan (English-Japanese Two-way Immersion elementary school), Board Member of the Japanese Teachers Association of Michigan (JTAM), Chief Editor of Japanese Heritage Language Journal of American Association for Teachers of Japanese in U.S.

Her most recent publications include Raising Children as Bilinguals - Bilingual Education from Age Zero (ed. 2007, Akashishoten, Japan), and Invitation to Multilingual Education (co-author, 2010, Hitsujishobo, Japan).