Teaching Philosophy
I genuinely believe I learn just as much from my students as they learn from me. This belief frames the way I approach teaching. I focus on facilitating an exchange of ideas to cultivate an open and receptive environment for diverse conversations. By engaging with art, design, and artmaking through various methods—reading, thinking, drawing, iterating, reflecting, and listening—my students and I can shape and cultivate our minds and experience demonstrable personal and intellectual growth while creating positive change in the world.
My role as an educator is to share what I know and guide my students toward their own ideas while reminding us both to remain open to new approaches. I have found this openness a vital strategy for my own work. I demonstrate this open-ended, malleable posture with the words that guide and focus my approach to education. In a lecture by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson he states, “If you are not at the boundary between what is known and unknown, befuddled every day, you are not in the game.” Growth and discovery in art and design practice occur in this realm between the known and the unknown, which is precisely where a creative person should want to be. I champion uncertainty in every endeavor while encouraging students to ask questions and embrace feelings of confusion or imbalance. As artist Janine Antoni states in a discussion of her tightrope performance artwork Touch in her Art 21 interview, “it wasn’t that I was getting more balanced, but that I was getting more comfortable with being out of balance.”
My ongoing artmaking-design-research incorporates my Indian heritage and interest in South Asian philosophies, particularly the concept of non-dualism, to trouble the centrality of the artist in Western approaches to artmaking. In my research, I ask if it is possible to de-center the artist/maker to open new possibilities and avenues for thinking through our work. In my teaching practice, I cultivate a space that attempts to de-center the student and be tolerant of uncertainty while encouraging students to approach their work prepositionally. I encourage students to think about, through, above, across, against, despite, among, beyond, inside, within, unlike, because of, without, like, upon, etcetera. An essential aspect of being an educator is acclimating students to feeling out of balance and guiding students through any initial hesitations to establish a generative practice.
I ensure my enthusiasm for art, design, and artmaking is infectious regardless of their future professions. My goal is to encourage self-discovery by facilitating an environment where we reimagine errors and missteps as opportunities for growth rather than pitfalls. An equal balance of technical knowledge and creative problem-solving is also required. Lighting a flame and piquing interest in artmaking, design, and creative practice--an interest that reaches beyond the end of the class is my ultimate goal.
My role as an educator is to share what I know and guide my students toward their own ideas while reminding us both to remain open to new approaches. I have found this openness a vital strategy for my own work. I demonstrate this open-ended, malleable posture with the words that guide and focus my approach to education. In a lecture by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson he states, “If you are not at the boundary between what is known and unknown, befuddled every day, you are not in the game.” Growth and discovery in art and design practice occur in this realm between the known and the unknown, which is precisely where a creative person should want to be. I champion uncertainty in every endeavor while encouraging students to ask questions and embrace feelings of confusion or imbalance. As artist Janine Antoni states in a discussion of her tightrope performance artwork Touch in her Art 21 interview, “it wasn’t that I was getting more balanced, but that I was getting more comfortable with being out of balance.”
My ongoing artmaking-design-research incorporates my Indian heritage and interest in South Asian philosophies, particularly the concept of non-dualism, to trouble the centrality of the artist in Western approaches to artmaking. In my research, I ask if it is possible to de-center the artist/maker to open new possibilities and avenues for thinking through our work. In my teaching practice, I cultivate a space that attempts to de-center the student and be tolerant of uncertainty while encouraging students to approach their work prepositionally. I encourage students to think about, through, above, across, against, despite, among, beyond, inside, within, unlike, because of, without, like, upon, etcetera. An essential aspect of being an educator is acclimating students to feeling out of balance and guiding students through any initial hesitations to establish a generative practice.
I ensure my enthusiasm for art, design, and artmaking is infectious regardless of their future professions. My goal is to encourage self-discovery by facilitating an environment where we reimagine errors and missteps as opportunities for growth rather than pitfalls. An equal balance of technical knowledge and creative problem-solving is also required. Lighting a flame and piquing interest in artmaking, design, and creative practice--an interest that reaches beyond the end of the class is my ultimate goal.
