• MAKE
• WRITE
• TEACH
• LEARN

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Supporting students and witnessing their transformation into artists and engaged citizens, teachers serve as catalysts for growth, facilitate speculation and discernment. For me, art is a sensorial and cross-disciplinary endeavor for expressing and interpreting ideas. The courses I teach simultaneously address the technical and material competencies of new media and encompass interdisciplinary topics that inform my art practice such as mapping, care studies, collection, and local foodways. I empower student to discover and share their distinctive visions translating and transforming their abstract ideas into visual, aural and tactile manifestations of information, cultivating an active awareness of the physical and conceptual world as well as the larger community.

My pedagogical approach encourages students to use digital tools and media reflectively rather than recursively. Technology learning in the arts is not only about deepening expertise, but developing an art practice that not just based in production, but in relationality with the materiality of the object, making visible current economic, social and environmental contexts which then becomes analytical frameworks that informs the content of the work. Although access to technology is ubiquitous, knowledge about the apparatus is often hidden. I seek to cultivate thoughtful makers who will be future creators of knowledge rather than unconscious consumers.

I seek to empower students to realize and site their vision by working with the community through service-learning and field trips. I orchestrate learning situations that result in projects where students collaborate with organizations across the university and in local community— packaging seeds for regional seed library, collecting data for neighborhood arts coalition, uncovering the hidden infrastructure of our campus wastewater treatment plant or learning about sea grass stewardship through underwater recording in the Gulf of Mexico. Students not only diversify their repertoire of ways to approach the translation and transformation of abstract ideas into visual, aural and tactile manifestations of information, and through cultivating an active awareness of the physical and conceptual worlds as well as the larger community. Interactions with residents and organizations in Gainesville and the region invite students to reflect upon the relationship between curiosity, appropriation and extraction as a way to develop meaningful exchanges and arts collabo- rations within the community. My pedagogy asks student to situate their work within a broader context of contemporary culture.

I seek to empower students to realize and site their vision by working with the community through service-learning and field trips. I orchestrate learning situations that result in projects where students collaborate with organizations across the university and in local community— packaging seeds for a regional seed library, collecting data for a neighborhood arts coalition, uncovering the hidden infrastructure of our campus wastewater treatment plant or learning about sea grass stewardship through underwater recording in the Gulf of Mexico. Interactions with residents and organizations in Gainesville and the region invite students to reflect upon the relationship between curiosity, appropriation and extraction as a way to develop meaningful exchanges and arts collaborations within the community. My pedagogy asks student to situate their work within a broader context of contemporary culture.

The learning that occurs between teachers and students is reciprocal. Students have taught me to be more aware by checking in and being more explicit in articulating my instructional intentions. I acknowledge and fully engage myself in my role as mentor and bring openness and inquisitiveness and experimentation into each teaching opportunity, remaining connected to the learning process myself.