The teaching I now do extends a classroom career that began at San Francisco State University (SFSU), where I oversaw the Inter-Arts Center\u2019s (IAC) art education MA program. At the IAC, I was part of a program emphasizing \u201cinterdisciplinarity\u201d across arts practices, among academic disciplines, and between the university and the world outside. Strategies of innovative collaboration within and among institutions were critical in this work. Later I assumed an arts deanship at De Anza College, during which I worked to introduce the \u201cLearning Community\u201d model for the entire college. In Learning Communities students enrolled in clusters of related courses (with titles like \u201cFamilies and Migration\u201d or \u201cEarth and Environment\u201d) to make studies relevant to lived experience. My De Anza work with veteran educators taught me more about teaching than any prior experience. Notably, at both SFSU and De Anza I was a key faculty member in digital media studies, expertise that factored heavily in my recruitment to Irvine.<\/p>\n
At the UC Irvine Department of Art (formerly Studio Art, renamed 2012), I\u2019ve worked with BA and MFA students, concentrating the last several years on our new \u201cVisual Culture\u201d series, which I originated and designed. These large undergraduate classes (many online with up to 1200 enrollments) address critical thinking, identity performance, and globalization in what is for me a project of student empowerment and citizenship education. Receiving the department\u2019s highest student evaluations for this work, I often am asked to address fellow faculty on innovative teaching methods.<\/p>\n
My administrative endeavors as a chair, dean, and research director have been informed by my PhD work in educational leadership.\u00a0 As an artist\/writer committed to critical pedagogy, I left the familiarity of the art world for a time to surround myself with K-12 teachers and principals. This \u201ceducation\u201d instilled in me the necessity of dialogue and collaboration in negotiating bureaucratic power relationships. In other words, I recognized how lofty ideals of democratic \u201ctheory\u201d actually play out in practice.\u00a0 I learned that consensus requires conversation and that there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction.<\/p>\n
These are tough economic times for our university. We should be able to articulate the benefits of creative enterprise: as engine of innovation, economic force, collaborative laboratory, historical record, philosophical model, community organizer, political instigator, emotional window, or therapeutic tool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The teaching I now do extends a classroom career that began at San Francisco State University (SFSU), where I oversaw the Inter-Arts Center\u2019s (IAC) art education MA program. At the IAC, I was part of a program emphasizing \u201cinterdisciplinarity\u201d across arts practices, among academic disciplines, and between the university and the world outside. Strategies of … <\/p>\n