Teaching Philosophy
The dancing body in the digital age is frequently experienced as fragmented—parsed into discrete parts, captured, abstracted, and circulated as data. While technologies have become increasingly adept at recording, analyzing, and reproducing movement, this ease of translation often comes at the cost of context. Bodies are rendered as products, symbols, research subjects, or records, detached from the social, historical, and cultural conditions that give them meaning. In this landscape, teaching cannot stop at technique or tool use alone. Instead, students must develop investigative frameworks that allow them to reassemble the body as a whole, situated, intentional, and responsive.
I approach dance education as the cultivation of artists who are simultaneously makers, researchers, technicians, historians, and critical consumers of culture. Rather than training students to simply keep pace with emerging technologies, I prioritize helping them build adaptable modes of inquiry that can travel across tools, platforms, and disciplines. This emphasis prepares students not only to create work, but to understand how and why that work operates within broader systems of meaning and power.
To foster this investigative capacity, I design classes around focused prompts explored through multiple disciplinary lenses. Instead of unraveling many yarns, I ask students to unravel the same yarn in as many different ways possible, through practice, theory, collaboration, and critique. By leveraging technical and theoretical understanding born of active participation, and by learning process mechanics in tandem with content orientation, students gain the flexibility to apply information across subjects and disciplines. Both making and discussion are treated as experimental processes, emphasizing how mechanics, structure, and intention shape meaning. This approach supports student agency by encouraging exploration without imposing a singular aesthetic, while still demanding rigor and reflection.
Central to my teaching is active questioning. I use guided inquiry to help students develop flexibility in both thinking and process—skills essential for collaborative creative work and for navigating moments of uncertainty or creative blockage. Interdisciplinary collaboration is encouraged as a means of expanding how students understand their own skills and how those skills might function in unfamiliar or hybrid contexts.
I place particular value on one-on-one engagement with students. Individual conversations allow me to identify moments of potential growth and to offer tailored questions that help students articulate their intentions, examine assumptions, and view their work from multiple perspectives. Coming to interdisciplinary contexts through dance, I approach all subjects as forms of studio practice. This means emphasizing sustained engagement, iterative development, and reflection over time. Theory is integrated through readings, viewings, and discussion, which I treat as active laboratories for testing ideas rather than passive absorption of content.
Ultimately, I aim to cultivate learning environments in which knowledge is not delivered, but practiced. Students are encouraged to question how media, movement, and cultural artifacts are constructed—and to recognize their roles as both creators and consumers within an information-saturated world. Developing critical literacy alongside creative skill is essential not only for artists, but for engaged citizenship. My goal is for students to leave the classroom with tools for thinking, making, and questioning that remain relevant long after specific technologies or platforms have changed.
