About Your Instructor

A bit about my teaching philosophy and commitment to my students.

The Approach

Being an educator involves so much more than sharing content and expertise with students in a course. True learning opportunities happen when instructors utilize their ever-growing expertise to mentor and partner with students in order to engage them on a level that encourages their own self-assessment into their abilities and potential and then to provide them with the resources, content, encouragement, and support needed to be critical thinkers, life-long learners, and activists.

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I view my role as an educator and mentor as one who’s primary purpose is to facilitate through methods of creating spaces for discussion surrounding content and experiences, challenging ideas and perspectives, encouraging research and interests, and then supporting avenues of action. I have high expectations for all of my students but they are anchored in the learning outcomes and objectives of the course, the program, and then institution of which I am an active part. At all times I believe my students should be able to connect what we are learning and doing back to the primary goals of a course and program at the same time they are able to use those platforms as a starting point from which they can insert their own personalities and experiences in order to tailor those elements into specific, applicable, and usable opportunities; and then I actively help them to design their coursework to put those elements into practice both within the space and scope of the course, and out into their lives.  I work to provide detailed descriptions of the outcomes, foundational ideas, inspirations, and basic requirements of all activities in my courses and workshops in order to provide scaffolding and allow for foundational connections while providing them with the tools and opportunities to become active learners and developers in their own projects and learning experiences so they are not simply creating a deliverable, but actually developing the parameters through their own analyses, reflections, and justifications therefore giving them a much more rounded perspective of what they are doing, how they can manipulate it, and why it matters to them, the institution, and even the spaces and people around them.

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To me, the most important things I can do for my students, and therefore the commitments I make to them, are as follows:

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I commit to…

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• continuing my own educational development through always seeing myself as a student and never as an expert so I can ensure I am in constant pursuit of education and reflection and can therefore provide better content, instruction, and support for my students.

• holding my students to a high standard in regards to critical thinking and analysis, research, reflection, assessment, and initiative in regards to their own work, skills, abilities, experiences, and possibilities to challenge them at whatever level they may be in order to help them leave more prepared and capable than they were when they entered.

• always encouraging pushing compositions to the next level rather than settling for creating a deliverable that they don’t understand, connect with, or can connect to a learning outcome or objective so that students can truly engage with what they are working on and have relevant and meaningful experiences to take forward past the doors of our classroom.

• supporting the diversity, creativity, and ambitiousness of my students even if it means stepping outside of my own comfort zone as I ask them to push the boundaries of theirs; learning comes from exploration.

• challenging my students, and adversely accepting their challenges, so that we can partner in the learning experience because true education is more than content sharing and providing information.

• them, as “no significant learning occurs without a significant relationship” (James Comer), to continuously work to foster trust, bring excitement, and invest in students and the course in order to help students to move past classroom learning and into lifelong knowledge, application, and activism.