TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Recently I was asked to express my “teaching philosophy”, I found the exercise quite useful and I thought I’d copy and edit the results here on my blog. What I found first and foremost is that I don’t have a teaching ‘philosophy’ because I don’t want to develop a personal dogma toward teaching. Instead I work with a set of general principles and values that constantly change overtime, maybe that is what a philosophy is! Technically I teach animation, design sometimes, most of the time it’s just a pretext to help people seeing more clearly about more than that. I don’t teach methods, procedures or rules. Overall I just teach how to learn because that is what people need most. That is what helped me the most. Here are the points that I identified as guiding my teaching:
The Student: every student is an individual and by working on educating themselves they are doing something that is wise, brave and unstoppable. Although education is not tailor-made because we guide students to meet some standards established by a larger community what remains personal for each student is the learning. While what is being taught is universally accepted, the way each student learns is personal. It is my responsibility to help students tune their learning process so that they meet the standards. Educating is ideally teaching how to learn, the subjects we teach are just practice runs for the bigger learning that needs to continue after ‘school is over’. It turns out, school is never over because the world becomes our teacher.
The World: the world is complex and our role as educator is to equip our student to deal with it. This means that my efforts are focused not only on providing the tools and techniques to become active members of a culture (in this case through learning about media, art and design) but also to be able to adapt to changing conditions. If there is one thing I want my students to learn is that the only constant is change, that nothing is permanent and that being awake to changing opportunities and threats as well as their own strengths and weaknesses is the key to a successful life in society. My goal is to train students as members of a culture and a society to which they contribute with their own personal culture.
The Fundamentals: a good education goes through learning the fundamentals. In my field that what we are really teaching are not the technical skills or the tools. What we are teaching is how to participate in culture: through storytelling, drawing, expressing, connecting, conversing, writing, critiquing, imagining, exploring, experimenting, etc. I am convinced that when individuals have a good grasp of the fundamentals of culture they are equipped to learn further for a long time, from themselves and from their peers. There is a lot of fundamentals to learn. I take a practical approach to teaching fundamentals, through experience, whether it’s a set of storyboards or a sculpture made out of discarded electronics!
Those are some of my teaching principles. I teach through inspiration, experience and I also show students how I learn myself. At least they know that learning doesn’t stop with a degree!
