Studio Teaching: Demonstration, Critique, Revision

​

In studio courses, I combine focused demonstrations, clear assignments, individual coaching, and structured group critique. I set transparent expectations through rubrics and examples, while recognizing that students reach strong outcomes by different paths — a beginning drawing student and an advanced painting major are not solving the same problem, even in the same room.

​

Critique is central to how I teach. Students describe what they observe, name their own goals for the piece, consider how a viewer might read it, and decide what to push further. This builds technical proficiency alongside visual literacy and self-assessment — the ability to talk about one's own work with clarity, a skill many students, including first-generation and returning students, have never been asked to practice before arriving in my classroom.

​

Art History as Transferable Inquiry

​

I also teach art history, art appreciation, and interdisciplinary arts, where I treat visual analysis as a transferable form of inquiry: observation, evidence versus assumption, an interpretive claim, comparison across contexts, and a well-supported conclusion. These are not only studio-adjacent skills — they carry into research, writing, and professional communication regardless of a student's major. I use concise lectures, close looking at images, guided analysis, and discussion to keep this rigorous without making it inaccessible to students encountering formal art history for the first time.

​

Student-Centered, Inclusive by Design

​

Regional, comprehensive institutions serve students who bring a wide range of life experience into the classroom — first-generation and returning students, working students and parents, student-athletes, and students whose prior access to arts education has varied widely. I view that range as a source of perspective, not a deficit.

​

I work with Disability Services to implement approved accommodations, and across face-to-face, hybrid, and online sections I rely on clear organization, detailed instructions, visual examples, transparent rubrics, and frequent low-stakes opportunities for feedback — practices that support students with accommodations while improving the course for everyone. My role is to hold a high standard while making the path toward it visible.

​​​

Learning Beyond the Classroom

​

I treat community arts institutions as an extension of the studio rather than a field trip from it. I coordinate students' direct contact with exhibition practice — juried competitions, gallery talks, and visiting-artist critique — through partnerships with a regional art museum and community arts centers, so that presenting work publicly becomes a normal, recurring part of their education. I've brought that same public-facing approach to K–12 audiences as well, co-leading an elementary-school art and art-history workshop.

​

I developed and taught Southern Pottery Throw Down, a high-impact experiential-learning course that took students into the field in Louisiana and Mississippi to experience Newcomb Pottery, Shearwater Pottery, George Ohr, and Southern face-jug traditions firsthand — because some of the most important learning happens when students connect their region's material culture to their own hands-on practice.

​

I've mentored students into fully funded MFA programs and helped several present their work at regional and juried exhibitions before they graduated. As a longtime faculty advisor to a student art organization, I've also seen how much of a student's growth as an artist happens outside of graded coursework, in the community they build with other makers.

​

I scaffold that growth deliberately: lower-level courses open with self-inventories and foundational-skill exercises that build curiosity and self-awareness, while upper-level courses ask students to apply those skills in authentic scenarios — mock client briefs, collaborative problem-solving, research projects, and capstones — that build the professional communication and durable, career-ready competencies (critical thinking, written and oral communication, teamwork, technology) they'll carry past graduation.

​