Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

• I believe that visual literacy is an important component of scientific and medical education. I teach because I want to foster future generations of scientists and educators who share my belief, and have the abilities to participate in an increasingly visually-oriented society.
• I believe that to be an excellent teacher you must examine traditional teaching practices, as well as your own, and continuously seek to improve instructional effectiveness and efficiency. Many of my favourite instructional techniques require time-intensive one-on-one instruction, and though my classes are still relatively small by most standards, the growing volume of students I deal with makes time scarce and those teaching approaches less feasible.  I actively investigate and use solutions to make better use of time. For example, in my undergraduate and graduate courses, I employ guided peer-review activities that engage students in reflective practice, and increase access to frequent feedback. For my first year graduate course, I developed a prototype web-application that streamlined informal feedback processes, and improved my capacity to provide students with frequent high-quality criticism.
  I value feedback from the students and employ their feedback to refine my courses. I study my course evaluations, meet with students for one-on-one course debriefs and have started using informal, anonymous online surveys to gather more specific data about my courses than represented in the institutional surveys. This data helps me to be responsive to student needs and to iterate on my instructional methods and course designs.
• I believe that excellent teachers thoughtfully scaffold information and, whenever possible, avoid shallow explanations in favour of robust ones. I learn best when I make an effort to understand why something works in a particular way. Generally, I don’t like being given a set of rules to memorize and apply. I feel that I need to understand the logic underlying the rule or guidelines. For example, when I was learning to make two-dimensional colour images representing three-dimensional spaces, I was taught a simple rule that the strongly illuminated surfaces should be rendered with a ‘warm’ palette of colours and the surfaces in shadow should be rendered with ‘cool’ colours. This is a common rule of thumb taught to nascent illustrators and painters. Unfortunately, this rule is overly reductive; and frankly led me to a lot of frustration and confusion. It violated my own visual experience of the world and trapped me in a conceptual dead-end. 
  While simplifications are often a useful means of introducing topics in a manner that does not overwhelm a novice, the ease with which an instructor can dole out such simplifications must be compared with their potential to perpetuate shallow comprehension or possibly outright inhibit deeper understanding in the learner.  Simplifications should ideally be designed to build upon other well understood concepts and constructed in a manner that supports expansion. The warm-lit-side-versus-cool-shadow concept is a failed simplification because it is often presented in an arbitrary and prescriptive manner. From my own experience, learners presented with this model have difficulty because it is often presented without first discussing the behaviour of light in the environment (e.g., absorption, reflection and refraction) and basics of human colour vision (e.g., trichromacy, opponent process theory). My own solution to this teaching problem was to create a progressive sequence of learning activities designed to help students develop a robust and flexible mental model of illuminated 3D spaces; this approach included the development of new lecture materials and a novel virtual experimental space that has engaged the students and encouraged a deeper understanding of the topic.
• I believe that high quality instruction in my field capitalizes on the students’ capacity to directly experience success and failure in visual media design. In many fields, it is a difficult challenge to demonstrate a theory in action. For example, it is impossible for a student to directly observe atoms. Getting students to accept the basic tenets of atomic theory generally requires an instructor to build an argument through reference to many experiments not conducted by the student themselves. As an instructor, I have a great advantage because — for most of my students — I can design visual examples and experiments that let the student directly see the theory in practice.  In all of my courses, I invest a lot of energy in the design of my lecture visuals and aim to employ contrasting visual approaches whenever possible to help make theory become visible and experienced.  
• I believe that formative or iterative evaluation is equally or more important than summative evaluation. 
  Providing students with the opportunity to practice interpreting and acting on critical feedback is vitally important to help them develop strong communication — visual or otherwise — skills. Students need to think, create, reflect and revisit as much as they can. I structure all of my courses so that students get an opportunity to create, receive feedback and iterate. This practice is particularly strong in my graduate course MSC2001Y where students formally submit at least two drafts of every assignment for assessment and feedback. In the fall term of 2015, I provided each student with an average of 6.6 instances of formative feedback that they could employ to improve their work; and they all participated in two formal, guided peer review activities that provided extra opportunities for formative feedback as well as a chance to practice critically evaluating visual media.
• I believe that an important role of a university educator is to encourage students to develop into independent, self-directed learners. I spend much of my time teaching in a professional graduate program where students require tangible skills to gain employment after they graduate. Instructors in my domain have traditionally taught a combination of applied theory and technique; and students have relied on instructors to provide them with the technical skills that they would use throughout their careers. Today, the pace of technological development has devalued the transfer of technical skills; skills valuable now can swiftly lose their worth as new techniques and technologies emerge. I concluded that it is less important to transfer technical skill sets than it is to foster independent learning habits and methods, so that the students can teach themselves new tools and methods as they become required in their professional lives. To this end, I challenge my graduate students to learn new technologies on their own (often warning them that “One day I won’t be around to provide answers”), and support them by helping them to design a learning plan and providing advice when they reach a difficult impasse. This approach — student led design of their own technical skills syllabus— has been very successful in my graduate course MSC2006H and with the MRP students under my supervision.
• I believe that a complete education in visual literacy and visual communication requires a balance of activities including analysis, evaluation and creation. Traditionally, the professional graduate program that I teach in emphasized image and visual media design and creation. Students emerging from the program were adept at generating new imagery but not necessarily good at engaging in critical discourse about the qualities of images that make them function both aesthetically and for communication. At both the graduate and undergraduate level, I have tried to improve the balance by creating more opportunities for students to participate in structured analysis and critique activities.  This has included the introduction of guided-peer-review activities in all of my courses and the introduction of analytical assignments like the usability report assignment in my graduate course MSC2006H. I believe that these assignments are providing my students with good opportunities to develop a broad range of visual literacy skills.
• I believe that a great teacher has to be an empathetic human. I aim to model empathy by demonstrating concern for students’ well being and sensitivity to the myriad pressures that affect young students' academic performance. In all of my courses, I make a point of clearly announcing that their well being is very important to me and encourage them to keep me informed of any issues that they may be experiencing. This policy of open communication has generally worked very well and I am very proud that, in several instances, my efforts have played a role in guiding a student to a successful academic outcome.

Masters Research Project Supervision

In 2011, I obtained an appointment to the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies. This permitted me to begin supervising students. What follows is a list of student Masters Research Projects that I have supervised or am supervising.

2014-2015

2013-2014

2012-2013

2011-2012

In my first year of supervision the theme found across projects was gaming. Each of the three students developed projects that employed strategies to engage learners drawn from video games. It was a wonderful year and we had many excellent sessions together prototyping the games.