Welcome to my teaching blog. I’ve taught at The Evergreen State College since 1997, gradually developing strategies of incorporating animation into the teaching of a variety of disciplines including fine arts, sciences, history and literature and media studies. For information about my personal creative work including films, flipbooks and other animation toys, please visit Random Motion. To view my films, go to my vimeo page.
I collaborate with several other faculty in the Media Arts and Studies Path of Study, also known as the Moving Image Group, to teach critical and experimental approaches to media history, theory and production. We rotate in and out of our foundation program, Mediaworks, which I am teaching in this year (2018-19).
I’m collaborating with two other faculty in planning two broadly interdisciplinary programs for 2019-20. In Arts of Urgency (fall and winter quarters), students will explore the historical and cultural contexts of Latin American film, animation, and literature, beginning with Third Cinema in the 1960s and continuing into the present. They will learn how to do close readings of literature and film, analyzing social and political themes, and gain skills in visual and written storytelling and basic analog animation techniques.
In Animating the Sea: Motion, Light and Eyes (spring quarter), students will gain introductions to marine biology and animation through an exploration of optics and how the eyes of both humans and various sea creatures affect their perceptions of the world around them.
In 2017-18, printmaking faculty, Lisa Sweet, and I taught Studio Projects: Outside the Lines, a variation on a program we taught together in 2009-10 called Drawing Outside the Lines. You can see what kind of work we did in that program here. In 2016-17, I co-taught CultureLab: Advanced Projects in Visual and Media Arts with Evan Blackwell. In this year-long program, students researched, developed and produced capstone projects as a culmination of their Evergreen education.
In 2015-16 I taught Visualizing Microbial Seascapes: An Introduction to Animation and Marine Biology with Gerardo Chin-Leo. This was a fall/winter program that repeated in spring 2016 with new students. Students collaborated to produce two versions of The Monograph Project to demonstrate their understanding of marine microorganisms, a blog of animation, illustration and descriptions of many Puget Sound plankton species.
In November 2013, I wrote an entry for the Animation Studies 2.0 blog “Protean Media: One Animator’s Perspective” for their focus on animation and technology.
In spring 2012, I co-taught “Animal Others in Image and Text” with Anne deMarcken. Working with Head of Instructional Media, Stephanie Zorn, and IT Specialist Amy Greene, we collaborated with students to create the eBestiary, a blog that compiled and presented each participant’s research and creative response to observations of animals during the quarter. In November, 2012, the eBestiary won the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium’s Award for Innovation in Educational Technologies. You can view a short documentary made for the awards presentation about the eBestiary below.