courses & curriculum

 Below our courses I have taught at Arkansas State University and the University of Memphis.

teaching philosophy 

During my sophomore year of college, I was enrolled in an entry level design class in the Fine Arts Department. After a successful high school experience on the newspaper and yearbook staffs and a great freshman year excelling in beginner design courses, I confidently entered my first fine arts class with the mindset that this would be simple. The professor was exciting and relatable, and I got to experiment with new mediums beyond digital art. Then reality set in during one of our final critiques. “I don’t think you fully understood the scope of the project. It’s okay, but sometimes we don’t always get it right.” My jaw hit the floor. There had been few times in my student life that someone knocked me off my high horse, and it was a valuable lesson that sometimes, we don’t always get it right. 

That professor not only humbled me, but she is one of the reasons I chose to pursue academia. My teaching philosophy is grounded in the notion that each student is their own person with their own thoughts, opinions, successes and struggles. I build my courses in a way that a student feels comfortable in approaching each assignment as a challenge without the fear of failure. By creating different modes of engagement between myself and a student as well as student group activities, I develop an opportunity for students to become more than passive observers of material in order to interact and learn more effectively. I believe students should understand that sometimes we don’t always get it right, and that is okay as long as we are striving to learn, challenge ourselves, correct mistakes and find success in the end product.

I believe higher education should produce employable and active citizens. To achieve this in the classroom, I set strict guidelines and deadlines for projects with opportunities to redo assignments after hearing my feedback in order to correct mistakes and learn proper methods of communication to avoid the same errors in upcoming projects. In day-to-day classroom experiences, I pull from real world events in order to encourage critical thinking skills and produce timely, meaningful projects that students can place in portfolios or on student websites. I also pride myself in being able to pull from real world experience because of my background in former corporate communication roles.

During Fall of 2020, our classes as a university all went remote because of the challenging times of COVID-19. Because of this, I restructured my class and introduced the collaboration application Slack as a tool for communication. This followed suit with my open-door ideology of communicating with students. Students were extremely receptive to this kind of communication where we could message privately or talk in a forum at any point during the week. During each class meeting, I conducted a chatroom experience outside of our Zoom meeting with questions about real world events that were in-line with that week’s oral communication curriculum. This method of engagement was met with extremely positive feedback because students were experiencing email overload and Zoom fatigue across all areas of their academic experience. I used the same method for my asynchronous graphic communication classes which allowed students to work together and ask questions about how to use Adobe programs in a class that would normally involve no interaction among classmates. 

By crafting engaging assignments and activities beyond the regular lecture or Zoom, I aim to prepare students to be collaborative employees in their careers as well as responsible and outgoing citizens. Likewise, by allowing students chances to fail, critique and redo assignments, I hope to nurture a sense of humbleness and flexibility within my students so they are able to show the same grace and integrity in their own lives either as employees, leaders or future academics.