Teaching Philosophy
My teaching is informed by my trans-disciplinary educational background. Coming from engineering into the humanities at the doctorate level allowed me to get familiar with diverse approaches to knowledge. My engineering education taught me an incremental skill building approach that rely on the solidity of prior knowledge and expertise. Whereas, the artistic and humanistic pedagogy at Duke University introduced me to a restorative pedagogy that require students to question what they think they know and open themselves up to a collaborative experimentation for remaking meaning. In my teaching, I build my classes upon a mixture of these approaches and encourage my students to explore both with the appropriate level of precision and playfulness that different epistemological methods call for.
My background in engineering and the arts inspires me to put these fields in conversation in my teaching. During my time at Duke University, I taught courses and workshops that foreground an arts-integrated approach to web-based programming and interface design. In my classrooms, I aspire to foster an open-minded, stimulating, and collaborative learning environment where students learn the foundational concepts and methodologies as well as explore the gaps in our knowledge. My courses integrate theoretical, aesthetic, and technical explorations of the subject matter in ways that bring together critical thinking and practical skill building.
Having a trans-disciplinary approach allows me to support students from a wide range of disciplines and motivate them to reach beyond their own disciplinary formation, assumptions, and means. Towards this end, I prepare my courses to provide translations and bridges between the arts & engineering disciplines and encourage students to gain awareness of the strengths and limits of each discipline. With this, students from a range of disciplinary and educational backgrounds help each other explore paradigms from multiple angles that draw from their respective disciplines while also opening up their view of the world to new perspectives.