Teaching Philosophy > Administrative Philosophy

My job as a teacher is as diverse as my classroom, involving multiple tracks of teaching and learning. I assume the roles of teacher, artist, designer, advisor, mentor, and critic, to lead and learn from my students in an environment where we work together, critiquing, debating and evaluating ideas. I encourage them to address photography from a wide range of perspectives, and to research, explore, and initiate work that reflects their own experiences and histories. I provide training to help them master the craft of photography using a wide range of materials and media, and at the same time help them to develop their own voices as informed, contemporary artists living in a complex, multiethnic world. I want them to have an understanding of photography along practical, historical, and theoretical lines, and from local, national, and global perspectives. And I want them to be good citizens; tolerant, benevolent, and just.

My courses are constructed around the belief that students learn best when they are invested. And so, I give them a say in course objectives and let their own creative ideas drive their work. I want them to achieve goals I set out for them, but also achieve their own goals and assess their own performance. If practical training underlies their ability to work well with photographic materials, knowledge of history and theory contribute to their understanding of content and context, while personal investment allows them to investigate what they know and what they want to know.

All of my students have something to say, my job is to help them say it, with creativity and heart. I want to provide a track record of positive experiences for them to build upon, and help set the stage for a mature voice to unfold. I work with them to achieve a high level of visual literacy that allows them to see their own work against a backdrop of contemporary and historical art, but I also want them to have the ability to decode the barrage of visual signs presented to them by visual culture. If in the process their romantic notions of photography tend to fade, a more informed vision of it and how they will use it can take shape. “Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed,” wrote Robert Ingersol.

In the classroom I pull together a mix of lectures, hands-on demonstrations, group discussions, critiques, workshops, visiting artists, reading and writing assignments, slide shows, videos, websites, and field trips, in a multipronged, multiethnic approach to teaching that blends practice, history and theory with a broad range of ideas and artists working in a variety of media. I am constantly adding new ideas to my list of projects and assignments to foster creativity and create a dialogue in a laboratory think-tank environment where I can help students grow into informed visual artists.