Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Images, motion pictures, interactive texts, and other visual and aural media are the essential ways in which people interact with and express their relationships to the world today. Through media we encounter and express ideas, exercise our power as consumers and producers, explore new perspectives, and invite others to experience our own worldview. Constructively engaging students with the communicative, expressive, persuasive, and ideological registers of various media is of key importance, and thus, the core of my approach as an educator has developed around fostering critical student engagement with media texts and media practices.
I believe in an active classroom.
The great gift of studying media is developing the ability to decipher the complex system of images, sounds, language, and ideas that permeate our environment and constantly seek our attention. Through my experience teaching my own students and observing a range of masterful professors during my tenure as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Southern California, I have arrived at the conviction that the best vehicle for developing these critical skills is action—be it actively discussing and workshopping ideas, writing responses and analyses, or making films and other multimedia objects. Action as a key to learning is at the core of my point of view as a teacher, as actions like talking, writing, and building shift the emphasis in learning from the consumption of knowledge to critical engagement with texts and ideas.
I believe in combining history, theory, and practice in novel and challenging ways.
I see engagement with the history, theory, and practice of media texts as exceptionally important. A key challenge in media studies is overcoming the remote disconnection of history and the abstract mystification of theory. Thus, demonstrating the ways that history and theory are of core importance to the development of intellect and intellectual curiosity are central to my teaching. The cycles and patterns of history lend tangible insight to the present and the future. Historical case studies around media practices, texts, or technologies frequently distill wider trends in society and culture, making them accessible. Questioning—of assumptions, institutions, the world, or simply your own professor’s perspective and pedagogical strategy—is the core action at the heart of theoretical thinking. When framed this way, many students realize that they have been engaging in theory for most of their lives. My goal is to make the tools of history and theory tangible and accessible to students so that they can take them into the world—be it through scholarship, media production, or everyday life—and put them to work.
I believe that thinking through media helps us learn and think about media.
One way that I encourage students to put ideas and skills to work in the classroom is through regular, structured media use and exploration. This includes exploring ways to utilize existing, accessible media tools to create critical discourse. In addition to written work, students may be asked to use Powerpoint to create a visual essay about the ways that people process and trust information they access visually, or they may use an application like Scalar or Korsakow to remix and reorder the familiar narrative tropes in a particular film genre. In my proposed course on gender representation, students are asked to rewrite popular songs and memes in order to critique the socializing effects of gender assumptions in media. It is my conviction that courses combining scholarship and creative practice can effectively foreground the theoretical potentials of creative undertakings alongside the creativity inherent to critical thinking. Exposure to creative tools develops the student’s ability to form reasoned arguments both within and outside the registers of written language in order to meet the growing visual and aural plane upon which all individuals—be they student, scholar, consumer, or citizen—are increasingly addressed.
I believe in collaboration.
I believe that the classroom should be a collaborative, creative space in which all members are respected, treated as adults, and tasked with challenging ideas and becoming active partners in the entire community’s learning and discovery. Collaboration functions as both a learning challenge and a real-world skill set that is as essential as the development of a strong voice, point of view, and the ability to reason analytically. I encourage collaboration and interaction in a variety of ways including class discussion boards, peer review, and group and class-wide projects. Where possible, I also like to use platforms that allow individual projects to engage and dialogue with other individual projects, such as the use of Scalar in the images and memes project in my course on gender representation. This project asks students to develop an argument about gender and media using a database of images and memes that I place in the Scalar database. Each student builds their own, curated pathway with a visual and written argument, and these pathways intersect in complex ways as students develop varying reactions and arguments around the same images. The result is a complex network of class ideas around gender representation.
I believe that ideas have power and should be treated as a valuable resource.
Within the creative community classroom space, ideas are seen as important assets with transformative power. In recognizing this power, students learn to value their own ideas and those of their classmates while developing new appreciation for the torrent of ideas that are transmitted, strengthened, and amplified through media channels in their lives each day.
These convictions guide me as an instructor inside and outside of the classroom. My goal is to feed the passions of those students who already possess an intense desire to study film and media while equipping all students with the media literacy and critical thinking skills they need in order to navigate the world. I believe that these objectives are vital to the project of educating and shaping the next generations of media consumers and media makers.
