Like my research, my pedagogy emphasizes art as a tool for knowledge production. In my courses, I encourage student curiosity while teaching broad transferable skills that will be useful in a range of professional environments. In doing so, my objective is to model the values of life-long learning while developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

To teach curiosity, I structure direct links between content and student interests. For Introduction to Material Culture, students produce weekly forum reflections on questions like “what three objects would you save from a global catastrophe and why?” These questions teach them to apply our lessons to their own ideas, but also scaffold the final assignment that requires them to envision value and meaning from an object’s point of view. The task references and builds on our first week’s reading (Schiffer, The Material Life of Human Beings) where the author imagines how an animal might understand the human world. By specifically encouraging speculative and arts-based outcomes, this project demonstrates student research and knowledge-synthesis in creative ways.

Critical thinking also requires connections between student experience and course content. For Art in the City, I co-designed and co-created an audio walking tour of campus that takes students to various sites including an historic farmhouse, the Brutalist library structure, and new subway station. At each stop, the tour links the social and historical context of the site back to earlier course content. Through these architectures, I deliver lessons about Indigenous presence on campus, the history of university institution-building in Canada, and the connection to nearby communities. The podcast format enables this large 400+ person class to have individual, embodied encounters with the objects, while demonstrating how their learning environment shapes past and future knowledge production.

Through my Post-Production Workshop, I teach creative problem-solving skills that are essential for working in the film industry but can also be applied more broadly. I scaffold the semester on a single project, so that students learn how planning and pre-production is crucial for editing, shoot footage, and then individually edit the film. Building on existing software skills, this class teaches theory using Walter Murch’s conception of editing as a series of choices (In the Blink of an Eye). Since this class is designed for sophomore ESL students, his text is easy to read while providing deep insights into the editing process and industry workflow. By starting as a group and then editing individually, students enact their own choices on shared material that will be similarly edited by their peers. In this way, the class can compare the creative choices and practical problems-solving faced by each student. Furthermore, the emphasis on organization means that students learn transferable skills in project communication, group management, logical data organization, as well as information tracking and scheduling.

By emphasizing curiosity, critical thinking, and creative problem solving, I equip my students with the skills they need both in and out of academia. I teach as a conversation—a two-way flow of information—in order to create frictions between what assume we know and don't know, and to question the possibility of fully understanding anything. In this unstable understanding lies the love of learning—of continually working to discover more, understand better, and to consider the world with a new perspective.