 ART EDUCATION-teaching
Currently I teach contemporary media and art and film history and video production at Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, California. I have recently taught video art and visual thinking courses in the Art Practice Department at The University of California, Berkeley and courses in the youth programs of Oregon College of Arts & Crafts and Pacific NW College of Art.
Statement of Educational Philosophy
I have been an art educator for eight years. While I hold high standards for my students,
my main goal in every classroom is to build community and a supportive space for
student artists to start a life long relationship with art practice and their
classroom community no matter what their future career. These are teaching
skills that work for people of all ages.
I treat the student artist like the fully
capable, visionary, valid and interesting people that they are and enter my
relationships with respect and care. I am dedicated to encouraging students to
develop their own style, find their own lines of investigation within their
work and make their own particular connections to art, visual culture and art
history within the structure of great assignments. I believe strongly in
nurturing each student’s personal history with the visual world whether they
have experienced work canonized in museums and books or the media that
surrounds us everyday. I am dedicated to exposing my art students to art and
ideas as a possible means of expressing important social histories in the past
and present. I am committed to
including the ideas of under-represented artists, contemporary art, traditional
art history and cultural producers of all kinds in my classroom discussions and
slide talks.
I rely on the language and
structure of 2-D and 3-D
visual foundations as the building blocks of all visual art forms, including
time-based media and teach those original skills as a vocabulary for students
to communicate their best ideas. It is through the structure of a challenging
assignment that the mind must innovate to find the best outcome. I also believe
in nurturing a reflective classroom community that can speak about the work of
their peers using the vocabulary of art practice.
I have a holistic view of the student and
believe that art is a great subject for an integration of the qualities of
compassion, intellect and craftsmanship.
In the end education is about shaping people’s lives, not
just their skills in one particular area. The art classroom can be a place
where students develop the capacity to be great listeners, generous critics,
empathetic viewers and creatives who reflect the world back to us through
contemplative crafting of the materials and tools of art and film making. I
love teaching this empowering subject.
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