Architectural Studios:

• Freshmen Studios

• Junior Advanced Studios

• Senior Advanced Studios

Required Courses:

• Computer-Aided Drawing

• Construction Materials

Design Studios:

Below are examples of the design studios I have taught over the last several years.

DESIGN BUILD EXPLORE

2017 - Present

Over the last several years I have undertaken the development and funding of a design build program hosted at the Delaware Academy for sixth graders. The year long class challenges students to take on a community design build project. Through his exploration students learn about the design process and design can create lasting change in their community.

BOSTON ARCHITECTURAL COLLEGE

2015 - 2017
Adjunct Faculty

Over the span of two years I taught a collection of courses at the BAC. Each semester I taught one first semester studio, Transdiciplanary Design, and one thrid year studio, Tectonics. These courses rotated on an as needed basis between graduate students, undergraduate students, on-site and on-line delivery. As a faculty member of the BAC we are given the unique opportunity to generate and implement my own course content within the given topic of the course. Below is a selection of student work that was created in my design studios over that period.

Please visit the-bac.edu for more information about the Boston Architectural College

DOWNCITY DESIGN

Design Educator
2013 - 2017

Over the three plus years at Downcity Design I had the great pleasure of being a design educators to elementary , middle school , and high school students in a variety of schools in the Providence RI school district. My time at DCD provided me with the opportunity to coordinate courses, develop curriculum, teach, and learn about the incredible ability for design to engage and change students. The courses below are but a few of the many projects I worked on while working for DCD and are varied in scope, size, budget, and ages.

Please visit downcitydesign.org for more information about Downcity Design

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY: 
 

Teaching is a reflective act.  My philosophy of teaching asserts that learning exists at the intersection of two engaged human beings -- in the space between the uncorrupted passing of experience from the teacher and the will put forth by the student. There, in the gap between student and teacher, is where students claim knowledge and understanding as their own.  It is my hope and philosophical approach to encourage each one of my students a sense of power and agency over their own lifelong learning.  

When I engage students my primary mission and focus are:

• to create a classroom environment where students feel safe and secure expressing and testing their visions, voices, and processes;

• to encourage students to propel their own learning through personal interests and real-life application of concepts;

• to enable all students to succeed by their own personal standards under a clearly established, elevated, and attainable level of expectation

Every student thinks and absorbs information in different ways.  Every student succeeds and fails in different ways.  In each class, it is important to establish a secure and free environment for students -- a time and place for each student to figure out who they are and how they plan to tackle the abstract and concrete processes of the work. I believe that it is critical to creating an atmosphere that supports students in the focus of their own design. Through this focus, I attempt to create assignments and curricula that will set a pace for the class while maintaining a flexibility that gives power to the student to guide their own learning.

In practice, I try to apply this philosophy to my positions in teaching architecture and design.  Over the last several years I have been a participant and leader in several classrooms, critiques, and summer programs.  I have had the pleasure of being an Adjunct Professor at the Boston Architectural College in their graduate department.  As an adjunct teaching a variety of studio courses, it is my goal to challenge and encouraged students to find their own projects among the often confusing and overwhelming atmosphere of the architectural studio. Knowing that each student has a unique set of experiences that he/she will bring to the conversation, it is my goal to engage those experiences and bring them to the forefront.  Through careful curation of assignments and curriculum, I ask them to mine their lives, their talents, their thoughts, and their surroundings for a spark that can propel the student throughout the semester. This requires both the student and myself to intensely engage with the work that is being presented each week and make clear the responsibilities that are expected of both parties.  I take each student’s processes, triumphs, and struggles very seriously.

As a design educator and coordinator with Downcity Design at Nathan Bishop Middle School, I applied this philosophy from the onset of the program, beginning with an initial project that gave the students an opportunity to explore…….. This special “anything goes” time allowed for experimentation and the opening up of possibilities for the students that were generated from our given client that requested us to design and construct garden composting structures. By giving students the opportunity where anything was possible we established the norms for how to critique, what was constructive feedback, and how to focus their ideas.  -- this is good.   Through study models, drawings, full-scale construction, and presentation, each student analyzed as many ideas as possible—from the most simple to the most dynamic—and refined them into the conceptual framework that was slowly evolved for our final build project. With so much initial ownership and enthusiasm, it was easy for me to guide their ideas into reality. Through this process of experimentation paired with real-world education, we were able to impart values of creative making, environmental responsiveness, and community engagement while simultaneously encouraging that initial spark of free-thinking within an established classroom culture.

It is projects and processes like these that imbibe students with a thirst for life-applicable knowledge. They challenge students to define the parameters of their own education, and in that window, open an avenue for the teacher to impart wisdom about things the students are truly interested in.

My hope as a teacher, organizer, collaborator, and designer is to assist students in exploring their everyday world through an education that connects them to their own ways of learning, in the classroom and in the world beyond.