a socially-engaged artist, strategist, and learner
teaching through making and experimenting
Teaching Philosophy
I believe learning happens when a student pushes past their comfort zone and moves into a space
of testing their boundaries. These are the moments that instill bits of information or experience in
a way that students can look back on. Doing everything safely rarely produces the shift into
ingrained learning. That is why I prioritize an experimental classroom.
Learning also requires something to pin itself to. A theory needs to meet a life, interactions with
materials in hand, and sites visited, creating a basis for the theory to become knowledge. I have
found that covering the same topic through analog and digital means, reading, discussion, and
making bridges to the gaps between different forms of attention. The classroom is meant to form
an ecosystem because knowledge is held collectively. When students support each other and
create a classroom, the opportunity for expanding learning becomes more possible.
A moment that has stayed with me and anchored my belief in a classroom ecosystem was in a
Design Foundations course I was teaching at the University of Utah. One student had made a
piece he was proud of and considered perfect; he saw no reason to continue iterating on it.
Instead of addressing this directly, I went around the table and started engaging other students in
talking through their processes. I picked up my own work-in-progress and demonstrated how a
single change, making something dramatic or subtle, could shift the story of an image.
Eventually, the student pulled his collage back toward him and started working alongside us. At
the end of class, he came to show me that he had made something he was even more proud of
and thanked me for the openness in the class conversation. That moment clarified my beliefs
about lateral classroom movers rather than direct ones. If you create the conditions and model
curiosity, you can trust students to find their way to work.
My own practice sits at the intersection of ecological systems, material culture, and participatory
making. My MFA thesis, FELT, brought together sheep farmers, urban waterways, and
community felting workshops. While developing that curriculum, I was designing for students
with no prior knowledge of giver systems. I focused on the potential for surprise and material
encounter. Asking people to connect their bodies to an environmental argument. This is the work
I want to continue through teaching, building classrooms where students encounter the
strangeness of a design problem as an entry point into a research journey. I want students to
leave classes with a sense of what the environment can ask of them