I believe it is the job of professors to facilitate students’ acquisitions of knowledge and experience as a primary consideration, and serve students wherever they are in their learning process. My teaching philosophy incorporates both granular aspects of pedagogy, as well as how to deliver it to students. As a contrarian, I delight in teaching my students to question the materials, the methods, and the structures that generated both; in practice, this means designing the course and assignments around critical thinking and writing, with the course content as a vehicle for delivering an epistemology of skepticism, wherever my students are in terms of knowledge and ability.
My approach to the classroom, both asynchronous and in person, combines the traditional lecture format with numerous methods to engage learners. Students write discussion board posts where they respond to a prompt of an open-ended issue, such as repatriation, and engage with each other. Additionally, they write shorter thesis-based essays in some weeks, and in the classroom, I often use an assignment called “Think-Pair-Share” designed to get students talking to each other and as a group that they turn in as part of their attendance and participation grade. I always offer weekly quizzes that are untimed and unlimited attempts to reinforce the material. Students have said they use it as a study aid, as well as to identify gaps in their own learning. These supplemental assignments offer students multiple axes to engage with course material and demonstrate learning outside of the traditional term paper and in-class exams.
Transparency is one of the more important tools in the kit for meeting students where they are. I interpret students asking, “Will this be on the test?” to be a request for clarification about learning objectives. When the instructor, the syllabus, and the learning module clearly state learning objectives, it removes the opacity for learners. I encourage students to take a journalistic approach: who, where, what, when, why, and how, and these questions factor into the learning objectives. An example of a set of learning objectives from the Ancient Egyptian unit is asking students to distinguish between the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms in terms of stylistic conventions set by the early Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom that later Middle and New Kingdom rulers conformed to or deviated from. I ask students to learn the periods, describe the conventions, and talk about the sociopolitical statements made by these conventions. This confluence of “journalistic questions” applied as specific learning objectives facilitates visual literacy in culturally-specific areas, as well as giving students the tools to interrogate images in their own learning process.
Writing Across the Curriculum (henceforth: WAC) has been the most influential pedagogical theory on my teaching practice, and I believe that, within the humanities, my application of writing-centered pedagogy undergirds student-centered learning. The rebuttal to WAC is that professors have too much material every semester to cover to also teach writing, but I have found that leading with the process of writing as scaffolded within in-class assignments encourages students to practically apply close-looking of an object. I believe that close-looking forms the core method of art history; when observing, discussing, and writing leads the learning process, students are more likely to retain art historical information alongside the added benefit of honing their writing skills.
In practice, I use a lot of scaffolding from WAC to teach students how to goal-factor (break a hard task into smaller, easier tasks), a life-long skill many of them will continue to use. Scaffolding additionally combats the temptation students feel to rely on AI. The term paper is broken out into multiple, smaller in-class assignments, such as the Thesis Workshop and the Rough Draft Workshop, that students are to incorporate into their final paper. Many students are intimidated by the writing process, and scaffolding an assignment has led to better writing outcomes: most students process the information at a sustainable pace, become familiar with the component parts of how to craft an argument and put it to paper, and gain confidence in their own voices and processes.
Democratizing access to knowledge requires more than critical pedagogy: creating the next generation of skeptics requires removing the structural barriers that prevent students from engaging with course material in the first place. I believe in the importance of accessibility measures, including offering captions, offering alt text on images, and adapting written materials for screen readers. When I designed my course at St. Joseph’s, the university standard was 70% accessible per Canvas metrics, which I consistently exceeded. In practice, this meant full captioning on all lectures that I checked by hand, using the tools in Microsoft Word to format for a variety of reading formats, and offering alt text when it would not conflict with the testing environment. In my in-person classrooms, I have taken accessibility measures with the digital aspects of the course and the learning management software. Additionally, when available, I use Open Educational Resources, such as the Look At This! textbook published by Asa Simon Mittman, and other OER textbooks. I also include many readings from Smarthistory, an online scholarly resource for art history that is friendly to lower-division courses.
Supporting English Language Learners is equally central to this commitment. English Language Learners have always formed a significant proportion of the student body in the CUNY system, where I have taught the most. Both Queens College and Hunter College are Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Baruch College is a Hispanic-Serving Institution Fulbright Leader. My lectures and activities are geared towards broad linguistic understanding. To facilitate note taking, I share my PowerPoints as PDFs with students before class to help them follow along, and I offer extra credit on writing assignments to any student who visits the Writing Center. The Rough Draft Workshop as an in-class assignment and Optional Rough Drafts for Feedback Policy encourage any student who is not a confident writer to get ample feedback and instruction before the paper is due, from both me and their peers.
As an educator and a researcher, I seek to instill in my students the same degree of skepticism about power and identity that I often feel when looking at a work of art. In Western Survey, I teach my students the canon with my own inclusions and substitutions, including Powerful Roman Women and People of Color in the Middle Ages. In Global Surveys, I allot as much space to cultures outside of the broad West and emphasize global connections. In taking these approaches, I teach students to question the canon, who constructed it and why, and how we can expand it to include more voices that are often more reflective of the students and their lived experiences. It is not enough to teach students the material; I believe educators need to teach students how to think and write. If I can inspire a student to engage critically, the source material will follow.