Teaching Statement
“Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know, as well as how we use what we know.” -bell hooks
Twenty-twenty-two (2022), was the 30th anniversary of my academic career at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres. The quote by bell hooks, vividly articulates this chapter of my journey in academia. It has taken a while to get here.
With each generation of BA, BFA and MFA students, I am excited to share my experience of the ever evolving media landscape and the technologies that my practice was sown of; as well as the digital tools I am adapting to.
As a University professor, my approach has shifted from teaching to teach to that of teaching to continue learning.
My goal as a professor is to meet students where they are and to steward them along a path to becoming artists working within this multiverse of moving image modalities.
My aim is to bridge the gap between what they believe they already knew and what they don’t know they didn’t know.
At times, in this exchange, I realize what I didn’t and needed to know to effectively engage them.
I have developed a niche in my practice as an interdisciplinary socially engaged artist. This is the core of my creative and philosophical approach to shaping thought and possibility for students who are becoming artists and filmmakers navigating a learning environment that offers expanded media forms and skill sets.
I offer an experiential foundation to students who are becoming filmmakers mining stories in multifaceted cultures and communities. Documentary is my love language, but I introduce students to all cinematic forms.
In my formative years as an assistant professor, my experience directing the Community Media Project-a unique media center within the film department-provided a footprint for my own hybrid documentary practice and engagement across generations within the city and county of Milwaukee.
Stories coming from young participants in our production workshops were urgently about the conditions of home and environment-and these took the shape of short and long form, grass roots, award winning documentaries.
My university students were introduced to a collaborative practice within diverse teaching and learning environments, mentoring and facilitating production, post production and film programming-as they worked alongside children, teens and mentoring adults, within in the field.
Through this applied practice students developed a consciousness that positioned a few to discover and appreciate the value of their own service to community-through teaching.
These are the core foundations that I continue to apply in designing courses with a community focus.
My teaching strategy is one that is collaborative, fluid and negotiable-by any means necessary.
I work at creating a learning environment that is both challenging and affable drawing inspiration from teaching models I experienced in my undergraduate years at Mills College, where an intimate teaching environment and experience where my mentor, art historian Moira Roth, introduced methods drawn from Avant-Garde creative salons, cultural and creative schools and artist collectives.
These were radical teaching spaces where ideas flowed between students, instructor and invited artists-in a critical and conscientious discourse that fostered critical inquiry and creative development.
My goals and objectives are built on these corner stones, with an intent to advance learning in unpredictable situations and conditions and to meet the needs of a changing demographic with diverse learning abilities.
As a professor, I want to continue to learn and to grow into this new world-as I teach.
Within the framework of my curriculum, I’ve found it useful to invite filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists and innovators to the classroom (or virtually) to discuss and present their work, and practice-to stimulate interest and learning beyond the conventions of some academic models.
In 2020, during a Covid mandated virtual campus, one of these visitors was celebrated filmmaker, Boots Riley-director of the experimental feature, Sorry to Bother You. He joined our class by zoom. This was a most stimulating experience for all.
He transparently shared the trials and tribulations of making his first feature and also shared his commitment to grass-roots organizing within his city and across the nation. Most importantly, he generously devoted time to receive questions from the students.
My courses integrate theory with practice. where ideas and practical learning are cultivated in an environment that is not restricted to the classroom.
In January 2023, I co-lead a cross disciplinary study abroad to London with a focus on visual culture as resistance during and after global Black Lives Matter events. This course was nationally recognized and took first place for Study Abroad curricular innovation in a national competition.
It is my desire to foster continued interest in courses and expand the boundaries of classrooms into international spaces when possible.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion have become more intentional across institutions of higher learning-since the summer of George Floyd’s murder and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, however intuitive as I believe it to be through my own lived experience and practice, I remain fluid to compliance with an expanding paradigm of best practices.
I implement inclusive and critical dialogue- as-practice to foster and not impede progress or transparent expression. I continue to work on building trust, confidence and critical language skills within my courses and among my students.
Courses I have developed in the last 15-years, have concentrated on context and genre, where I have been effective in introducing students to material that is often eclipsed in dominant cultural canons that can still persist in film education.
The freedom to do so is a welcomed shift in the FVANG department, and is born of a collective vision of current department executive faculty, and instructors.
Courses I teach:
Multicultural America
Film-150 (Multicultural America) is an interdisciplinary GER course that requires that students complete 15-hours (minimum) of community facing service (as learning) over the semester, to fulfill a public service graduation requirement. Students who complete more than the required hours may also receive credits for the University’s Cultures & Communities public service certificate.
This course is not restricted to film students, is taught using film as a survey to examine cultural identity, and representations in film and visual language that have determined how images of ourselves and those unlike us-have been constructed . I have taught this course since 2010, working with Non-profit community partners to provide a rich and diverse experience for students.
Radical Cinemas (Description)
The intention of my course, Radical Cinemas, is to introduce films and directors whose films and methods of story telling reflect radical cultural shifts and methods of storytelling in cinematic expression and histories across the globe.
I am unapologetic about the specificity of my film selections within a curriculum that is largely representative of cinemas across a far-flung BIPOC diaspora.
I am equally intrigued and excited to represent movements of new and third wave cinematic innovators responding to past and present cultural shifts.
Documenting Community (Description & syllabus)
Graduate Creative Studio (Description & Syllabus)
Study abroad Course (Description & Syllabus)