Teaching Awards and Fellowships

Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship, Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago, 2018-2019 (declined)

Francis X. Kinahan Award for Excellence as a Teacher of Advanced Academic Writing, University of Chicago, 2017-2018

Chicago Center for Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago, 2017-2018

Teaching Statement

Asking questions is at the heart of scholarly inquiry and creative exploration. As a teacher, the central question I want my students to ask is not “what do I see?” but “how do I see?” Through creative as well as analytical approaches, I hone their ability to carefully describe media objects; as a result, my students deepen their understanding of how media make meaning, both formally and in the spectatorial encounter.

As a teacher, I work to enhance students’ capacity to grapple with nuance and contradiction in media representations. Especially at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and media it is necessary— aesthetically, theoretically, and politically—to ask not just what is represented but how a representation makes meaning. Both in the classroom and through assignments, I use close analysis to help students grasp how media simultaneously reinforce and challenge dominant narratives, refusing any easy division into “good” or “bad” media objects. For example, through a close analysis exercise on Todd Haynes’ film Far from Heaven (2002), I guided “Introduction to Film” students in a discussion of lighting that led them to evaluate and then revise their initial assessment of the film. After first asserting that the film promoted interracial relationships merely by representing one, students came to argue that the film’s complex use of light and dark critiqued the racist, sexist, and homophobic society that made the relationship at the narrative’s heart ultimately impossible. Afterwards, their papers on other films indicated that, beyond noting the mere fact of representation, they were attending to how race, gender, and sexuality were articulated in and through media.

At the same time, posing the question “how do I see?” requires students’ attention to spectatorship. This is not only an important way for thinking about media but also, I have found, can be used to create an inclusive educational environment. Studying the spectatorial strategies that minoritized populations use to counter oppressive dominant images, including queer camp spectatorship and resistant spectatorship among people of color, can be immensely powerful for students. In one case, a student majoring in public health wanted to write about the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), but was struggling to construct an argument that moved beyond a disparaging summary of the film’s content. After asking her to describe in detail how the film represented the topics she wanted to address, from gender roles to consent, I introduced her to Manthia Diawara’s work on resistant spectatorship. Her final paper discussed how sex educators could repurpose the film to new ends by cultivating similar spectatorial strategies.

Attending to how we see makes explicit the fact that the classroom is never isolated from the world beyond its doors, and I prioritize creating a diverse classroom that is responsive to students’ experiences, identities, and perspectives. As a teacher and an advisor, I know that building diverse intellectual communities enriches my students’ educations, my institution, and my community. Therefore, I design courses so that work by and about minoritized communities is featured throughout the term, and in mentoring students, I connect them with resources that respond to their individual needs.

In addition to our identities, how we see is influenced by our preconceptions of the value of the media with which we engage, and as a new media scholar, I believe it is important to revisit and revise the priority that is typically given to canonical fictional feature filmmaking over other forms of media production. While students should understand the canon, it is equally important for them to comprehend its limits, and this interrogation allows students to think critically about how different media are more or less accessible to artists of different identities, backgrounds, and abilities. To this end, I incorporate a variety of media in my syllabi. Drawing on my training in media-making, I also use practice-based assignments to push students to engage with new media’s capacities and limits. For example, in an original course I have designed, “Monster Narratives: Race, Gender, and Monstrosity in Media,” students will use digital media tools to produce “monster selfies,” exploring how social media platforms solicit, facilitate, and police self-expression.

The distinction between what and how is central to my approach to teaching film history. The history of a relatively new art form like cinema can seem deceptively accessible to students; as a result, they often become invested in knowing which film or filmmaker was “the first” to explore specific technological or aesthetic possibilities. To foster a more nuanced understanding of film practices and history, I led students in “Introduction to Film” through a close reading of Rick Altman’s “Deep-Focus Sound: Citizen Kane and the Radio Aesthetic.” Reading his essay alongside clips from the film, students came to grasp the diverse ways that sound shaped and was shaped by the development of camera technology, as we traced the complex networks through which change took place. In this case, as in others, I guide my students to step outside of the teleological narrative of single causes to describe how technologies are developed and used.

Distinguishing between how and what also shapes my approach to assessment, and I use scaffolded assignments to emphasize the process of student learning. That is, by creating assignments that build on one another, I establish a baseline for each student’s performance—oral as well as written—early in the course, which allows me to provide feedback designed to help each student grow from that initial starting point. In particular, I have a developed a self-assessment instrument that cultivates student reflection on their participation and I offer individualized guidance on participation during the first half of a course. In addition to drawing out quieter students, my guidance includes strategies to further enrich the participation of students who already contribute strongly in class. Students consistently report that they have improved the quality of their class contributions through this dialog. By providing specific, actionable “next steps” on early work, I can establish whether my students are working toward achieving the course goals—and, critically, students themselves can measure their own progress against these guidelines.

As a new media scholar and documentary filmmaker, I believe criticism and creation mutually support one another. I therefore want my students to be able not only to appreciate, analyze, and assess the media they see but also to produce a wide variety of media on their own—not least as a tool for understanding the media they encounter in class and in the world. My participation in the Scholarship in Sound and Image Workshop at Middlebury College has prepared me to guide students with varying experience in media production through exercises that ensure that theory and practice are informed by each other. Although not all of my students want to pursue production seriously, by learning how to manipulate footage themselves, students come to see the media we study in richer and more complicated ways. Students thus gain critical thinking skills that allow them to negotiate our heavily-mediated society with the confidence, insight, and power—to evaluate not only what media say, but how they say it.