Teaching Interests

Teaching critical media studies and digital video production is a great opportunity to unite theory and practice. In a culture saturated with moving visual images, students’ familiarity with these texts often accompanies assumptions about how the images are created and what they mean.

I enjoy helping students break down images into their technical and aesthetic components at the same time that I help them ask questions about the connotations associated with the choice of content and composition.

At the undergraduate level, I am committed to teaching the foundation skills of video production – tripod shooting, three point lighting, headshot/dialogue framing and quality audio recording with boom microphones and lavalieres – combined with experimental strategies that challenge conventions and expand visual vocabularies. These various skills translate across a host of media; from documentary and public affairs interviewing, to narrative dialogue scenes, to experimental personal visual essays.

At the graduate level, I believe in fostering an atmosphere where students are encouraged to pursue their interests with my guidance and constructive critique. I am an active mentor of graduate students, collaborating with them on scholarly research projects as well as including them in my creative visual work. For students interested in an academic career, my teaching encourages the production of high quality research papers that will be presented at conferences or submitted to journals. For those interested in professional careers, I encourage internships and the production of “reels” that demonstrate the skills the student has to offer.

At its core, my teaching philosophy begins with student interests and attempts to unpack those interests and reveal connections to larger issues facing local and global communities. Across all my classes, social change and influence are recurring themes where meaningful and socially relevant work is actively encouraged.

Undergraduate video production courses

• Media Aesthetics: Spring 2008
• Television Field Production: Fall 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007
• Documentary Video Production: Spring 2002, 2003, Fall 2003, 2005 ,2006,2007
• Narrative and Experimental Video Production: Fall 2002, Spring 2004, 2005
• Advocacy Video Production: Summer 2005

Graduate seminars

• Media, Culture and the Environment: Spring 2003, 2005
• Qualitative Research Methods: Spring 2002, 2004, 2008
• Foundations of Digital Video Production: Spring 2006, 2007

Please see Recent Courses for descriptions of these courses and links to student work.