Start with yourself. Learn from place. Think in systems.

I believe art and design education should empower students to be active makers, thinkers, and change-agents.

My philosophy comes from the many moments I’ve spent as a learner and as an educator. One of the earliest is from when I was nine, learning to use weaving point paper to draft stained-glass stencils. It was a tool made for one craft, borrowed for another, and I’ve been fascinated by that kind of crossing ever since. Those moments carried through the formal learning I gathered over seven years of teaching, and they shape how I teach today.

It all moves like an ecosystem. We begin with the self, the first source of inspiration, and ask what each student carries with them. From there we look outward to the places they come from and the materials around them. Then we think in systems: the social, economic, and ecological chains that every design choice belongs to. As students’ experiences grow, so does the scope of their thinking.

How that thinking becomes work will always differ, and I want it to! Ideas are like language. We can all think in the same one, but we interpret it and speak it differently, whether our medium is paper, metal, thread, or leaves. My job is to help students find their voice in whichever one they choose.

I also see design as more than a set of tools. It is a way of thinking, and it reaches into the webs of systems we live in. Many of the problems in those webs feel like locks. We may not find a key for every one, but opening even one leads to questions and curiosity, and that is where learning begins.