TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
For my students and for myself, I want education to be a practice of liberation. To achieve that end, I establish respect for diverse voices in the classroom and I affirm students’ desires to become critical thinkers. I listen intently to their views and questions and encourage them to develop their own identities as artists and designers. Fostering an environment of mutual respect, I seek to instill in students a sense of safety, which makes possible the kind of risk-taking and thoughtful dialogue that leads to growth. I am there to guide, not to dictate.
As an instructor, I design assignments and projects to encourage rigorous critical inquiry, independent exploration, and risk-taking as a mode of learning. In all of my courses, my students engage in the course topic in a variety of ways, for instance by meeting off campus at specific sites, museums, and galleries. My classes are also asked to consider associated texts, films, books, and presentations of apropos work examples and fringe mediums. We employ a variety of lenses and use many techniques to explore ideas, for example, research, drawing, painting, building, and media. And once they work through key concepts, we begin the process of developing final presented works.
I carefully consider scaffolding and transfer as an instructor, developing lower-level courses that prepare students for more sophisticated work in upper-level courses. In foundational courses, my students focus on the fundamentals of art, design and architecture, using exercises to gain access to the language, physical materials and processes through analysis, inquiry, play, exploration and many iterations. And I continuously make connections for the students on how those fundamentals can and will be used for future projects. In upper-level courses, my students expand upon their foundation studies by analyzing and applying evidence-based research to investigate art, design and architecture in a holistic, design-thinking context that is conceptualized, interpreted and implemented at varying scales. Final projects involve deep investigations, and the emphasis is on articulation and evaluation of ideas with new perspectives, and clear expressions of their practice using the skills and techniques they developed in lower-level course work. These more advanced offerings provide students with the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in highly conceptual ideas, working through the abstract in order to manifest final works.
A cornerstone of my teaching involves communication. Specifically, my students receive extensive personalized attention from me and from one another. During studios, I meet with each student individually, and my custom approach helps to create a comfortable setting where students can question their own intentions and recognize their unique strengths. Through our conversations, they come to see how aspects of their personalities, interests, and life experiences could help them with the development of their work. In turn, I have in-class critiques throughout the semester during which students practice using objective vocabulary to offer feedback and solutions to other peers. My students discuss their own intentions and processes, reflect on the capacity of the work to embody ideas, and engage in a meta-critique of their own process as thinkers and creatives. Moreover, I invite other academics and outside professionals for midterm and final critiques so that students acclimate to receiving diverse constructive criticism. All of the dialogues we share facilitate potential individual connections to the proposed content, promote deep engagement with course material, and help students develop a sense of ownership for their creative process.
As a practicing creative, I try to offer a number of ways through classroom structures that my students can transfer their learning into real-life situations. When teaching art-based studios, I find spaces where we can display work, and use local environments for site specific installations. In my Biomimetic Art studios, we focus on our immediate surroundings and native plant, animal and vegetal kingdoms in order to intimately study and use our research to develop works of art that are site specific and potentially multi-purposeful. Additionally, I use my broad art and design network nationally and internationally for the benefit of my students, and have introduced them to internships and potential job opportunities. I use similar methodologies for most of my architectural and design based studios, where I find real-world projects and use local, accessible environments that we can visit and perform on-site analysis. Often we interact with my past and/or current clients on these occasions, and they partake in the course giving the students the opportunity to discuss business intent and answer any questions they may have. This way students gain practice in professional dialogue, so they can make appropriate, informed decisions to develop holistic solutions for their projects. I have worked with restaurant owners, retail establishments, children’s homes, local markets and galleries in this capacity. I also actively seek out national and international competitions for my art and architecture studios where the course content can be applied, and I can proudly say that my students have won renowned awards.
Using grading criteria governed by my academic institution paired with assessments I independently author, I give both verbal and written feedback throughout the semester, and use studio-centered quantitative and qualitative evaluations. I provide grading rubrics at the start of each semester, and project, so as to remain transparent. This way we have an accessible chronicle from which we can acquire communicated information at any point, while simultaneously developing a map for measuring performance over the course of the semester. If there are any questions or concerns, I make time to meet with students individually to discuss their progress, performance and grades. When and if there is room for improvement, students are offered the opportunity to do so. At the end of the semester, they also have the chance to assess themselves through written reflections on their experiences in the class, the successful techniques they developed, progress they made, and issues they plan to address in the future.
My students inspire me to step outside of myself and engage in different ways so that I can more fully and empathetically commune with younger generations and the world. They offer me the chance to change the way I think and interact. They provide a fresh environment for me as I place myself in the agency of their education. They allow for me to reflect powerfully, revise my classroom and work, and make critical decisions regarding changes to my pedagogy. I have discovered that I am a better creative and teacher when I engage with my students in life-long learning alongside them. In this way, learning becomes more effective for all of the participants. My studios constantly evolve; I constantly evolve. My students are my teachers, and that’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching so much.
Students essentially are works in progress working on their own works in progress. When they are encouraged to take ownership of their work and feel that their voice is affirmed, they are most deeply engaged in learning. Only by growing into their fullest selves can they do their best work as artists, designers, architects - and as people, too.