The disciplines of art teaching and making are intertwined and related for me. Whether I am interacting with students or applying charcoal to paper, I must embody and employ similar kinesthetic, cognitive and sensory knowledge, skills and capacities. How I make sense of my relationship to a drawing is also similar to how I make sense of my relationship to students. Both talk back, continually asking me to engage, probe, listen, learn and respond in new and unscripted ways.
Teaching visual art requires facilitating and coordinating several distinct learning processes simultaneously. Therefore, the syllabi for my courses are constructed around diverse learning objectives that balance making, thinking and knowing. My primary goal as a visual art educator is to facilitate and encourage students to become active participants in all aspects of
 their learning.
Through encouraging students to experiment and discover, I work to create a learning environment that inspires mastery, along with curiosity and imagination. Through processes of working with materials, form, shape, light, space and place, I work to train students in the hands-on processes of working
 with materials and technologies to produce images, objects and design.
Simultaneously, I work to facilitate the development of the cognitive and self-reflexive capacities that will enable students to think critically: to see how their making is contextually embedded in the world they inhabit. For this, I consistently look for ways to challenge the notion that we are separate from the curriculum we are practicing and studying. I work to illustrate how values, assumptions and worldviews influence action and in turn give shape and meaning to our world. Inviting students to work directly from their experiences, I encourage them to identify how their own values, assumptions and worldviews show up in the interdependent processes of imagining, cognizing and making.
Finally, I work to expand and refine not only what students know about art (the content of their knowledge), but also how they know. For this, an active inquiry into the physical and interpretive dimensions of perception is core to my teaching. I design assignments and readings that guide students to zoom their awareness into a refined moment-to-moment observation of how sensing and thinking arise. Other assignments guide towards a broader focus on how historic, geographic, economic, social and political factors are evident features of experience and the surrounding world.
Teaching visual art requires facilitating and coordinating several distinct learning processes simultaneously. Therefore, the syllabi for my courses are constructed around diverse learning objectives that balance making, thinking and knowing. My primary goal as a visual art educator is to facilitate and encourage students to become active participants in all aspects of
 their learning.
Through encouraging students to experiment and discover, I work to create a learning environment that inspires mastery, along with curiosity and imagination. Through processes of working with materials, form, shape, light, space and place, I work to train students in the hands-on processes of working
 with materials and technologies to produce images, objects and design.
Simultaneously, I work to facilitate the development of the cognitive and self-reflexive capacities that will enable students to think critically: to see how their making is contextually embedded in the world they inhabit. For this, I consistently look for ways to challenge the notion that we are separate from the curriculum we are practicing and studying. I work to illustrate how values, assumptions and worldviews influence action and in turn give shape and meaning to our world. Inviting students to work directly from their experiences, I encourage them to identify how their own values, assumptions and worldviews show up in the interdependent processes of imagining, cognizing and making.
Finally, I work to expand and refine not only what students know about art (the content of their knowledge), but also how they know. For this, an active inquiry into the physical and interpretive dimensions of perception is core to my teaching. I design assignments and readings that guide students to zoom their awareness into a refined moment-to-moment observation of how sensing and thinking arise. Other assignments guide towards a broader focus on how historic, geographic, economic, social and political factors are evident features of experience and the surrounding world.
