As an educator in the arts, it is my objective in the classroom to provide agency for the development of conceptual, technical, and aesthetic skills. I believe artists must possess the ability to evaluate and adapt their ideas in the constantly shifting world of art, and develop their reasoning and production techniques with breakneck evolution of technology. To achieve these ends, I focus on cultivating analytic and technical self-sufficiency in each student, so they can adapt as artists to contexts in and out of the classroom. By centering the curriculum on a process of critical thinking, students are induced to challenge themselves, their practice, and the process of art-making.

Asking students to contribute with this level of self-involvement can be quite demanding, and requires the instructor to commit equally into the learning process. The educator must love teaching, as I do, and understand that learning is an interactive process. Education in the arts draws on the collective experiences of the instructor and the students. The challenge is to incubate a student’s perspective while exposing it to a broad range of contemporary artworks, writings, and working methods. The students’ fundamental assumptions about art-making should be continually refined against a rubric of historical and contemporary thinking. The goal of such analysis is to temper the students’ point of view into a uniquely informed studio practice. What this requires is a great deal of tough love; I demand a lot from my students, but I’m willing to do the work with them.

When providing technical instruction, I emphasize the foundational mechanics of the technology so that the student can utilize their knowledge in a broad range of creative situations. In a lesson introducing the fundamentals of digital imaging, I have students work in small groups to create mosaics out of children’s blocks painted with colors and numbers. Like pixels, the numbers on the blocks equate a visible color with abstract numerical information. The students’ direct manipulation of the blocks allows them to interact with “digital” information in ways not possible through the computer interface. This exercise provides a tactile understanding of the composition of a digital image, the relationship between images and information, and the functionality of image manipulation within the computing environment. In technology oriented curriculum, I believe it is essential to promote self-motivation with the material, so that in time as the technology advances the student will be able to adapt and update their abilities.  When these critical thinking skills are utilized in the classroom, students become more engaged with the curriculum and ground the class material into their studio practices.