This is the meaning of the ignorant schoolmaster: from the schoolmaster the pupil learns something that the schoolmaster does not know himself. She learns it as an effect of the mastery that forces her to search and verifies this research. But she does not learn the schoolmaster’s knowledge.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

The short story:

I try to teach my courses in spaces that reinforce group-generated meaning. While providing students with theoretical, historical, and technical information, I generally use a seminar format along with various media to instigate discussion and individually motivated research projects informed by our particular area of study. While there is, at times, a place for lecturing (see below), critical thinking is a skill acquired only when one is challenged to engage new material while expanding the breadth of one’s own resources.

The slightly longer version:

My first real experience as a lecturer in an academic setting was an invitation from Dinah McClintock in 2004 and 2005 at the now defunct Atlanta College of Art (she is currently at Kennesaw Sate University). I invited a local art collective to install an environment in the classroom. When it was time for class, I lectured on installation practices without acknowledging the altered environment until after the break. When the students returned, we discussed the way they occupied the space differently and also considered how the unaltered classroom, which they had generally read as neutral, informed learning, subjectivities, and participation.

In 2006, Dr. Margaret Olin taught the course Research and Production in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I received my master’s degree (she is currently at Yale University). While she would reel us in if we got too far afield, in moments of struggle she would not save us or give us answers. Amazingly comfortable with the awkward pause, she taught me that working through one’s own answers is vastly more respectful and, in the end, more important to building one’s facility for critical thinking.

At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was a Teaching Assistant to Professor Rob Kiely, an amazingly dynamic lecturer who kept students on the edge of their seats each class. The course was History of Ideas, and we worked together for three consecutive semesters. After graduating, I was hired to teach the course Visualizing Aggression, an upper level undergraduate course cross-listed with Liberal Arts and Visual and Critical Studies.

In Emory University’s undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies program, I taught Visual Culture (Fall 2011) and Visual Scholarship (Spring 2012). Both courses were seminar format. The spring course shifted from strictly visual culture theory and critical writing projects to include the consideration of artistic production as a form of critical practice. This revised course also required a multi-media project where students were required to include still and moving images/audio/other forms supported by university wiki spaces.

Spring 2012, I am teaching a lecture-based survey of modern art history at Georgia State University’s School of Art and Design in downtown Atlanta. I believe theater style teaching brings with it a kind of spatially reinforced, unidirectional authority I generally seek to avoid. While there are some moments during lecturing that make me yearn for a seminar format so that we could unpack some of the broad sweeps inherent in covering an entire century in a few months, I have come to understand that students just entering the field of modern and contemporary art can benefit from getting a broad understanding of the practices that preceded them. This survey was created for studio majors.

Finally, I have been contracted to serve as an Artist-Teacher for the MFA in Visual Arts program at the Vermont College of Fine Art. This is a low residency program in which Artist-Teachers work with MFA students during their time out of residency.