Teaching Philosophy:
I believe that art education should be “felt” in nonlinear affective relationships to materials. I am dedicated to supporting student learning and experimentation as they develop their own understanding of identity and positionality within society. This means advocating for marginalized voices and acting through community development programming to better fulfill the needs of my students.
Felt as Material/Experience:
Education should be tangible and embodied. Education should promote the investigation of touch, the physical, and feeling, the ephemeral. A student should have space to create, destroy, rearrange, and rebuild as part of their education. Learning through making is foundational to arts-based research-creation and calls for interactive experiences with materials.
Felt as Affect:
Informed by affect theory, education can be most transformative when felt positively. In this way, education can foster the organization of affects into discrete categories of knowledge. The ability to address and process feelings is a form of knowledge that is unquantifiable, however essential for healthy student psychological development. This form of knowledge is what makes us human, and with the rise of consciousness for the non-human and biotechnological advancements for the more-than-human, we must value and promote introspection in education.
Felt as Non-linear:
Felt is made when loose wool fibers are agitated with friction, heat, and soapy water. Through this process, felt is the combination of fibers through the interlocking of their own scaled hair structure, constricting, coiling, and matting together. Felt, unlike other textile constructions, is non-linear. Felt has no start or end, unlike the selvage of woven fabrics or binding off a knit. It is not bound to a grid of consecutive loops or crossing yarns. Felt can grow in any direction, as sculpture, with variant density. Education should follow this same model of nonlinearity. Instead of abiding by traditional teaching formats, where the instructor determines what kinds of knowledge have value and when to share that knowledge, the curriculum should be ‘living’. This is because knowledge is found in spaces between and removed from binary thinking, in the flux of adaptably relevant, sporadically mindful, and peculiarly comprehensive research-creation.