I have been involved with education most of my life. I have been a student and a teacher, a researcher and a practitioner, a counsellor and a counselee, an experimenter and a mentor. As a teenager I developed my own environmental education program for elementary school children and delivered it in classrooms throughout the city. In my late teens and early twenties, I facilitated the integration of special needs children into mainstream education programs and taught leadership and skill building in programs centred on wilderness experiences. These early experiences began my involvement with (and my love of) knowledge-sharing and personal development that I have continued throughout my life, in one form or another, from the wilderness to the city, from imagining to making, from listening to doing, from exploring to demonstrating, to being deeply engaged as both student and mentor.
Over the years, I have strived to bring the following essential elements to the pedagogical experiences that I both design and lead:
1) Self-reflexivity and criticality
Questions are at the foundation of learning, and I believe learning to ask good questions of oneself and of the world around you leads to a richer learning environment both at an intellectual and practical level. In my teaching, I have employed a number of different approaches and exercises to encourage students to develop the craft of questioning critically.
2) Dialogue and participation
Dialogue in the process of learning offers the students the opportunity to engage and question the material, but also opens up opportunities for discovery and participation.
3) Understanding and managing expectations
Many conflicts arise from differences in expectations. Managing expectations refers both to communicating the expectations I may have of the students, but also understanding and managing the expectations they have of their learning environment and outcomes. There is always a diversity of expectations from the students, including achieving expected grades, learning new skills, being challenged, or simply being left to work independently.
4) Poetic Diversions
As a compliment to the clarity and structure I strive to provide, I also feel that both art and design education should be interwoven with poetic experiences. The knowledge we seek and the practice we share rarely arrives at answers through straight lines and purely instrumental thinking and as educators if we expect the students to engage in the making of poetic it is important to ask how we invite the poetic dimension to our teaching.
The Fabula Ding companion referenced below is my most extensive example of this.
Selected Courses
Art, Time and the Technological Imagination
I have been teaching this 1st year course for many years. It is a delight to be with students as they explore this complicated intersection of culture and technology.
There is more detail here or you can delve directly into the poetic online companion to the course here on the Fabula Ding website. It helps the students explore the five foundational themes of time, narrative, interaction, networks and collage.
From 2020-2026, the course looked more like this.
Art in the New Commons
Digital technologies have transformed the space of contemporary life. More than a century of massive advances in telecommunications technologies has collapsed time and simultaneously rendered the world small and more fragmented. We are freed from the necessity of having to be together and yet we are all increasingly and inextricable entangled. We carry our private world with us everywhere we go, and what it means to be in public, to be with others is no longer what it once was… and this was all before the COVID19 pandemic, the self isolation and the suspension of physical contact. What it meant to be together was already transformed more than we had taken stock of, and now we are still taking stock of how things have changed… What was lost and what was recovered? What is new and fresh and what will forever be an echo of the present? What did this do to our understanding of public and private space? What can media art offer for new imagining of art for the common world?
This course addresses the ideas and the practice of working with technology in the space of the commons, and asks what artist contribute to the common world through their practice. To engage in art making for the commons means to engage with spaces we share with others, and so this course is as composed of collective and participatory components as it is individual work. During the studio, we will explore these ideas together in dialogue, in experience and in artistic exploration.
You can see the course outline from 2025 here.
Lively Spaces: Fundamentals of Interactivity
This course attempts to introduce different artistic notions of experience to break down their relationship to the art object and consider how the audience participates in the process. Although it is excellent if students wish to pursue interactive art further, the principal goal is to get them to engage with the audience as a real entity with agency in the world rather than an abstract concept.
You can see the 2025 outline here.