Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
My teaching is grounded in community arts education and the understanding that community is a source of knowledge. I explore how art, place, and lived experience shape what and how we learn, and how pedagogical relationships can open possibilities for different ways of knowing.
Drawing on arts-based educational research and place-conscious inquiry, I approach teaching as a relational process in which knowledge emerges through encounters among people, materials, and the worlds they inhabit. I see students as active knowledge creators whose inquiries can connect academic learning with lived experience and broader social and cultural contexts.
My teaching and research are interconnected through a shared commitment to rethinking how knowledge is created, whose knowledge matters, and how education can contribute to relationships with communities and the living world.
In 2025, I received Simon Fraser University’s Early Career Award for Excellence in Teaching. (Read about the 2025 Awards for Excellence in Teaching)
Graduate Supervision
I supervise master’s and doctoral students and mentor research assistants through funded research projects. My approach connects supervision with collaborative, community-engaged inquiry. Students develop research, writing, knowledge-mobilization, and facilitation skills through shared project work, and I collaborate with students on scholarly publications.
Courses
The courses below represent my teaching at undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. Each course is listed once.
Undergraduate
EDUC 252: Introduction to Reflective Practice
Students develop inquiry and critical reflection through experiential and place-based learning, considering how the places where they live and learn shape educational experience.
EDUC 352W: Building on Reflective Practice
Students explore creative qualitative approaches, including autoethnography, performative inquiry, narrative inquiry, and poetic inquiry. Writing becomes a way to develop and communicate understanding, with attention to craft, reflexivity, peer response, and ethics.
EDUC 456: Models of Contemporary Arts in Education
Students investigate contemporary art in relation to pedagogies through hands-on, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged practices. Work in museums, gardens, and public spaces connects artistic inquiry with educational and social contexts.
EDUC 458: Pedagogy and Practice of Arts for Social Change
Through collaborative artmaking, workshops, and dialogue with community artists, students examine how the arts can support social change and the complexities of arts-based work in educational, environmental, and social justice contexts.
EDUC 464: Early Childhood Education
Students examine assumptions about children and educators through current research and practice situated in British Columbia’s educational contexts. Seminar and studio work includes pedagogical narration and material explorations for young children.
Graduate and Doctoral
EDPR 504: Exploring Making: Art, Design and Technology in Education
Students explore making across subject areas, investigating materials, interdisciplinary connections, and diverse approaches to learning. The course positions teachers as active makers of curriculum.
EDUC 848: Ideas and Issues in Aesthetic Education
Students examine critical approaches to aesthetics and their implications for arts education, culture, environment, and identity. Each develops a philosophy of aesthetics connected to their teaching or artistic practice.
EDUC 850: Creativity and Education
Drawing on educational theory, philosophy, artists’ accounts, and works of art and science, students examine creativity across contexts. Readings and dialogue accompany an individual project combining an artistic work and scholarly essay.
EDUC 945: Doctoral Seminar in Arts Education
Students engage with the history and current debates of arts education, including arts-based research, posthumanist pedagogies, and digitally mediated learning. The seminar supports doctoral milestones and the development of each student’s scholarly identity.