Teaching
TEACHING STATEMENT
Full Teaching Statement (4-page), with Student Works
My teaching approach is founded strongly on collaboration. Interdisciplinary collaboration enables the student to identify conceptual, communicative and practical boundaries between disciplines, which they can later apply to real world problem-solving. As a co-founder of the Game Design Initiative at Cornell University, we discovered that collaboration between fields results in novel projects, encourages creativity, and enriches the learning experience.
Education in engineering and the humanities must first be based on acquiring knowledge and practice. From 2007 to 2010, I was Co-Director of the Transliteracies Project for RoSE, a Research-oriented Social Environment, leading a team of five engineers and media artists to collaborate with literary scholars in the Department of English. As the student progresses they are able to pursue more challenging topics. However the rapid growth of novel media, including augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, online worlds, video games and artificial intelligence, strongly suggests that the space of potential ideas is much greater than classical topics of even ten years ago. In 2011, I was Assistant Professor in motion capture and graphics in the Medialogy Program at Aalborg University, Copenhagen, where these topics are integrated into a unified education in media arts. Interdisciplinary collaboration presents a way forward as a practical methodology for students and teachers to reformulate existing methods to reach these new and unexplored spaces in meaningful ways.