This text in work in progress. I post it online for share with friends to get feed back. 10/29/2011
Learning is percieved by many people as an elementary preparation to prepare for years of labor. Therefore, going to school indeed feels like going to work, and like work it is considered a necessary means to achieve the desired end. It took me few years of unlearning and teaching to realize that learning is best when it is an end in itself and teaching is best when it is an extended form of learning. My teaching philosophy is a proposition to democraticize the learning process and to build a community of friendship around learning.
After completing graduate school, I realized that the most subjects I wanted to learn were either not offered as a formal course or the subject was narrowly specialized and not accessible for people without formal training. I began to teach myself about the relationship between the subject matters and other subjects that I was already familiar with. Connecting dots in the distant fields of studies between new media (on practice as well as in theory) and urbanism (through action research and collaborative projects), I gained confidence that no matter how complex the subject matter is, there is a way to learn about it and also to use the learning, limited as it may be, for creative purpose. Self initiated teaching opportuinities via art exhibitions and community organization often provided a significant assistance in motivating and guiding the process.
Community of learning is essential for cooperation and inspiration that will elaborate casual conversations into a discourse and later into manifestation of an idea. I have extensive experience in community and teenage education, workshops for adults and graduate level courses at prestigious universities like Parsons School of Design. I enjoy creating curriculum and collaborating with other teacher and a specialist to make an engaging class. At a undergraduate level course, I try to provide the essential information and strategies to formulate opinion about that subject. My expertise includes socially engaged art practice, public art and urban intervention, previous teaching experience includes topics in digital video, mobile art as well as experimental courses on drawing, performance and research on activism and urban space. My art work with D.I.Y and low tech inventions are based on extensive research on the subject matter and the artistic potential of the medium, therefore learning and teaching is an integral part of my practice. Time based material on the internet, mainly video, sound and animation, is a very important tools of documenting and presenting the ideas as well as a platform to share the contents that are otherwise limited by its form of being ephemeral, participatory and context specific.
For past year, I have been dedicated serve as a committee member that faciliates an auto didactic learning community: The Public School New York and have been teaching at education programs at Eyebeam Art and Technology as part of a year long fellowship. One of the class that I organized, ‘Introduction to Sound Art’ was a successful example of multi teacher class for general participants, and it was also an opportunity to present my lecture on ‘Noise and public space’. ‘As a crowd gathers’ is a three part presentation about crowd and its representation on moving image that I collaborated with Red Channels. ‘Civil Disobedience in 21st Century’ is a series of class I orgnize with Jay Bachner. In these recent pedagogic experiments, I shift between the role of a organizer, a mentor and a lecturer, in order to open space for collaboration. In workshops and classroom situations, I encourage the students to discover the topics of their interest and to teach it to other students. Such method has been successful in motivating the students and for them to keep learning after the class is complete.