Experience Summary
I am a commercial graphic designer with 15 years of experience coupled with AS, BA and Master degrees. My work experience includes being a pre-press designer involved in all aspects of spot color printing, senior graphic designer in a marketing department of 4 designers completing a vast array of advertising collateral, extensive design and production of banners and signage, and offset and web press as well as large-scale installations. Additional work knowledge encompasses website design and email blasts.
Teaching Style
A number of factors come into play when considering what good teaching is. These factors include a mastery of subject matter allowing a teacher to lead students systematically through content to their own level of mastery. While teaching this mastery of content, teachers should do so with enthusiasm. Because of said enthusiasm, those types of teachers become memorable. If you can make learning fun, then even the hardest tasks take on an aura of simplicity; subsequently students learn and retain that learning.
Learning how students think is probably one the hardest aspects of teaching; especially if you are teaching to diverse populations. This is where the method of effective questioning comes into play. Effective questioning challenges students to think. It moves them from their traditional linear plane of thinking into more complex realms of thinking. My work experience allows me as a teacher to develop the ability to provide specialized guidance and direction to students where they are at in their development of content knowledge.
A final aspect of teaching is nurturing. An astute observation has been made that students become motivated and productive learners when they can work without a fear of failure. I believe this is even more important in the world of design. Design is very subjective. It does not have quantitative, objective data for judgment. Judgment is predicated on what a client likes or does not like. Therefore, there is a fair amount of failure. Teaching students to adjust to that failure and learning how to deal with it successfully is an integral component of the job of teaching graphic design.
My personal belief system of teaching designers incorporates the necessary tools (content/transmission), then how to use that content (apprenticeship) within the context of how each individual student learns (developmental) in an environment without the fear of failure (nurturing).