Over the past two decades I’ve taught classes on many aspects of visual culture such as the history of art collecting and display; the history of print including art, maps, comics, advertising and design; and the history of the built environment including cities, gardens and architecture. I’ve taught architecture students how to make great data visualizations. And I’ve been a regular guest critic at student presentations and thesis defenses.
Click on the items below for a sampling of my university teaching.
In my teaching I aim to foster students’ innate strengths, helping them to become more articulate, critical and creative in their thinking and communication.
Both as a student and as a teacher, I have decades of experience in the traditional academic routines of slide-intensive lectures, reading-intensive seminars and footnote-intensive writing assignments. I firmly believe in the value of those traditional methods of teaching people how to find, assess and communicate sound knowledge. But over the years I have also branched out into new learning modalities that may be better suited to communicating about visual matters in the digital age.
The title of a seminar/studio I designed for incoming graduate architecture students — Adventures in Multimodal Design — expresses my belief that learning is ideally a process of exploration full of curiosity, wonder, humor and surprise. The resulting discoveries are ultimately acts of self-discovery or self-realization, as we sharpen our powers of discernment through the application of new concepts, techniques and perspectives.
I say we because as a teacher I am always a fellow explorer, eager to learn from the students and to have them learn from each other through conversation, collaboration and peer critique. I rankle at the patronizing professorial habit of referring to their students as “the kids.” In a university setting we are all adults and we all have something to learn, so we should guard against paternalism.
The classroom is ideally a space of active experimentation and dialogue. It is a place to try out new ideas or investigative techniques in the presence of supportive colleagues. In smaller seminars and workshops the entire class can interact in a kind of dinner table conversation. In larger classes it is helpful to break the conversations into smaller working groups, both in the classroom and beyond. Even large lecture classes can benefit enormously from that kind of breakout session.
In the first class I ever designed — the Harvard seminar Particularities of Print — the weekly assignments took the form of anonymous blog posts that the students then critiqued in the classroom. The students’ critiques of each others’ work were always constructive, since they knew they would lose marks for unsupportive criticism, and since they were all subject to regular critiques from the same peers. In the same spirit I regularly elicit student feedback on the progression of the class as a whole, thereby allowing me to adjust my teaching style and syllabus accordingly.
In the Adventures workshop the students could either work alone or in groups of 2-3 to produce the final project, which was graded according to their individual input. I met regularly with each student at various points along the way. In that setting the greatest challenge was confronting the students’ ingrained habit of leaving projects half-baked until the eleventh hour. I learned to schedule accordingly, leaving myself time to work intensively on the few projects that were not up to standard. I liken my role in Adventures to that of the old-time record producer, whose job is to identify an artist’s peculiar talents, and then “punch up” their work until we have a hit on our hands.
The undergraduate seminars I designed and taught at Stanford University were fairly traditional in format, with heavy reading lists and written assignments requiring rigorous standards of research and citation. Since the subject was always some aspect of visual culture — e.g. prints, maps, museums — I taught all three classes in the presence of historical artifacts in museum or library study rooms. This hands-on setting allows us to peruse artworks, books and maps at will, and to spontaneously apply the lessons in the readings to concrete examples.
At Harvard University I was the first to teach the entire undergraduate Methods & Theory seminar in the museum study room with a selection of paper-based art. I fondly recall conversing with students in that class about Aloïs Riegl’s Group Portraiture of Holland in the presence of portraits ranging from Rembrandt etchings to photographs by Diane Arbus. The artworks were active participants in the conversation, enriching and sometimes productively disrupting the perspectives in the weekly readings.
When I can’t teach the entire class in a museum or special collections study room, I like to take students on field trips to places where we can engage directly with a range of great artifacts. Guest lecturers and critics are another way to make the learning experience more engaging and expansive. When students gain experience in giving and receiving real-time feedback they develop skills that can benefit them far beyond the classroom.
The links in this section are to some traditional, reading-intensive syllabi that I designed for advanced undergraduate art history seminars at Stanford University. All of these classes were taught in museums and libraries, usually with historic artifacts (i.e. rare books and prints) on the table.
In 2013 and 2014 I taught master’s students at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism how to produce effective data visualizations integrating words, images and numbers. (Syllabus here; annotated bibliography here.)
In those seminars I was in the role of design producer — vetting and punching up student work in the manner of a record producer. Click on the sample project below for a link to the description.
That Beer Styles Chart is by David King & Khoi Nguyen . Other projects from that brilliant class can be seen on the Design Incubator website.
I taught a more ambitious version of the same class in Winter 2014, where students made maps, and produced some pretty remarkable websites. Alas, those digital productions turned out to be more ephemeral than the previous year’s projects. Most have disappeared without a trace.
In Winter term 2016 I was a Digital Humanities instructor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I worked with professors Lisa Pon and Beatriz Balanta on developing research tools for an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in the history and theory of communications. Along with colleagues in Berlin and London, I trained the class in metadata basics and cataloging software. I also worked with select students on designing HyperImage interfaces for some 19th and 20thC photo albums in the Meadows Museum collection. The interface antiquated, but it’s a powerful tool for image annotation.
