I have a long and varied history in teaching. My story begins as a teenager when I provided a lot of informal tutoring in mathematics, chemistry, and physics to my friends and classmates. In high school, I had one very close friend who struggled in these subjects, and we met routinely after school for two years so that I could provide him guidance on his homework and studies. He ended up passing all his classes, and the interest in teaching I developed at that time is still with me today.
Undergraduate School
My first foray into formal teaching came during my undergraduate years at Georgia Tech when I worked as a TA for CS 1315: Introduction to Media Computation. This was an introductory computer science course targeted at students who were working toward degrees in subjects other than science or engineering, so I was immediately faced with the challenge of explaining computer programming concepts to students without a strong technical background. I started crafting programming demos and visual materials that helped illustrate these concepts (Figure 1) which I used when I led recitation periods, and I also constructed Microsoft Office tutorials that I and the other TAs gave to our students (Figure 2).
Figure 1.
CS 1315 used graphics programming to illustrate programming concepts, and I quickly discovered that my students appreciated a top-down approach where I started with the entire program and then broke it down line by line. Here, I use PowerPoint slides to walk through a basic pixel copy program, illustrating what was happening graphically every step of the way.
Figure 2.
This is a piece of a tutorial I wrote as a TA for Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The other TAs still only had tutorials for Office 2003, so I took it upon myself to make and distribute the necessary updates. I relied heavily on detailed explanations, strong visuals, and a bit of humor to help make the tutorials more accessible.
Outside of recitation, I held regular tutoring hours to assist students with their assignments, showing them how to break abstract problems down into a series of small programming tasks. I also sat in on the lecture portion of the class to ensure my teaching stayed within a relevant framework, and I started attending seminars and workshops offered by the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning to learn about new pedagogical approaches I could bring to my work. My first semester as a TA included a class where I received additional formal training in teaching policies and practices. Through these efforts, I helped achieve a pass rate of 85% or higher in every semester of my TA work.
Graduate School
As a graduate student, I served as a TA for LCC 6310: Computers as an Expressive Medium and LCC 6313: Principles of Interactive Design. Both classes had a heavy focus on the intersection of digital art, cognitive science, and technology, and the students needed to be brought up to speed on the fundamentals of programming, web development, and database design so that they could turn their ideas into working artifacts. This meant I had to cover more technical ground in a shorter period than I did as an undergraduate, and I was still speaking to an audience largely with backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and other non-technical fields.
I continued my practices of crafting visual materials (Figure 3) to use during recitations and providing regular tutoring hours outside of class. I also continued attending workshops on teaching and public speaking to improve my own pedagogy. To further ensure that I was placing my teaching in the appropriate context, I started assisting the professor of LCC 6313 with the textbook she was writing for that class. Some of my revisions made their way into her book, earning me a mention in her acknowledgements section (Figure 4). I helped achieve a passing rate of over 90% every semester that I taught these classes.
Figure 3.
I continued to rely on visuals and top-down walkthroughs to illustrate computer science concepts to non-technical audiences. Here, I discuss database and XML fundamentals.
Figure 4.
A passage from the acknowledgements section of Janet Murray’s book, Inventing the Medium (https://tinyurl.com/hyflch8). Please note that Spring 2010 was the semester in which I was a TA for this class, and I was active in encouraging students to participate in the book’s production.
Adjunct Faculty at Georgia Gwinnett College
Shortly after graduation, I applied for and was accepted as an adjunct faculty member for Information Technology at Georgia Gwinnett College. I was hired on short notice with minimal preparation time, so I had to adapt quickly to a new curriculum and the environment of an open-access institution. I started teaching ITEC 1001: Introduction to Computing which focused on the basics of computer literacy. I had to stress the increasing relevance of computers in all careers and fields of study, and I helped the students learn how to leverage the full power of everyday computing to make their jobs and their lives more efficient and practical. They learned how to teach themselves new software, how to protect themselves from malware, and how to keep their personal information safe online. I achieved and maintained a passing rate of 80% or higher from my very first semester.
I quickly moved on to teach ITEC 2110: Digital Media, a sophomore level project-based course focused on digital images, audio, video, and animation. I covered the technical fundamentals of digital media and taught my students how to use the appropriate software to construct digital media artifacts and post them online. By the end of each semester that I teach this course, every student has a complete online portfolio of their digital work that they can carry with them to future classes and job interviews (Figure 5).
Figure 5.
This is an example of the online profiles that my Digital Media students create. The image on the left is a profile home page, which links to the students’ individual projects such as the one shown on the right. My students use wikis to showcase their work.
As an adjunct faculty member, I taught a high percentage of non-traditional students. This meant I had the added challenge of working with students who were trying to earn their degrees while balancing heavy family and work obligations. I adjusted my teaching to include more lead time on assignments and projects and plenty of in-class work time in which they could ask their classmates and me for help. I also ensured that I offered office hours after traditional working hours.
During this time, I started to volunteer in the Academic Enhancement Center, GGC’s tutoring center. I tutored students both within my classes and in other IT courses such as programming and networking. I also began assisting both students and faculty members with non-curricular technology-related problems and questions, giving them guidance on the right tools to use and the best ways to find the information they needed. Throughout my time as an adjunct educator, I earned and maintained a comprehensive evaluation score of 3.85/4.0 with my supervisor.
Full-Time Faculty at Georgia Gwinnett College
As I came to recognize that I wanted to be more involved in teaching, I applied for and was accepted to a full-time position on the IT faculty at GGC. I have taken advantage of the many opportunities GGC affords me to improve my pedagogy and student engagement and bring more educational opportunities to the student body.
I immediately started expanding the range of classes I taught to include ITEC 2120: Introduction to Programming and ITEC 3450: Computational Graphics and Multimedia. In the former, I was once again faced with the challenge of bringing programming concepts to students with non-technical backgrounds, but we worked with Visual Basic to help them construct interactive programs that helped illustrate these concepts in a visual way (Figure 6). In the latter, I started working with junior and senior-level IT students which meant I could leverage their existing knowledge base to explore more advanced concepts related to the applications of programming to digital design (Figure 7).
Figure 6.
I asked my students to construct a basic calculator for one of their programming assignments. Using the interface builder in Visual Basic meant students had a strong visual component to accompany the back-end code they had to write.
Figure 7.
I asked my ITEC 3450 students to build the classic arcade game Arkanoid for one of their projects. This gave them an opportunity to explore the programmatic implementation of basic principles such as velocity, acceleration, and collision. We used Processing for this assignment.
I also started to explore new pedagogical approaches to my classes such as the flipped classroom. Over the course of a semester, I produced over three dozen online lectures and provided them as an alternative to my traditional in-class lectures (Figure 8). This gave students the freedom to revisit difficult technical concepts and to adjust the pace of their learning, and I started using more class time for review and hands-on activities.
Figure 8.
This is one of the online videos I use to teach my Digital Media classes. Here, I break down chroma subsampling and the YUV color system used in video production. I keep most of my videos to 15 minutes or fewer because students often absorb information better in smaller chunks. Please note the use of captions and tags and the ability to search within the video.
In my classroom, I ask my students to be active participants in a learning community. I begin each semester with an icebreaker exercise and encourage students to turn to their neighbor for help, and I ask these same students in turn to provide assistance when asked. The best way to learn the material, I explain, is to teach it to somebody else. I also offer frequent small group activities to help students collaborate on ideas and craft a better artifact than any of them could individually.
In addition, I bring a strong interdisciplinary focus into my classes to help my students develop cross-curricular thinking. I mix elements of writing and rhetoric, mathematics, science, and global cultural studies into the curriculum. I am currently working with the Physics faculty at GGC on a grant for the purchase of a new telescope for research purposes, and I intend to recruit ITEC students to assist in computer models and processing of telescope data.
I have also been active in curriculum development. I spent a semester in the Internationalized Learning Program (ILP), a GGC effort to bring more global cultural awareness to its classes. I attended several professionally-led workshops and conducted research on international issues in IT. I developed a version of ITEC 1001 that incorporates global awareness, and I now put these activities into practice in my existing ITEC 1001 classes.
My curricular efforts continued outside of ILP. I started attending workshops through the Center for Teaching Excellence and outside conferences on pedagogy, culture, and technology where I learned about resources and various proven approaches that I could bring into my classroom. I participated in a library-sponsored research effort to investigate a new hands-on activity that helped students learn how to evaluate online resources. I co-chaired a task force to re-evaluate the ITEC 2110 text and propose a new one which was accepted by the discipline and is currently in use. I served on another task force to craft policies for the new Digital Media Lab, which provides a wealth of cutting-edge multimedia resources for student and faculty use. I am currently working to ensure that all of my classroom technology is 508-compliant as I routinely work with students with a wide variety of disabilities.
Another important teaching responsibility I take on is student and faculty mentoring. I officially mentor around 30 students every semester on their overall academic and career goals, pointing them to resources and offering professional advice to help them achieve those goals. Many of these students come from historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged groups, and many are military veterans or first-generation college graduates, so I help them overcome the additional barriers that come with those circumstances. I have also assisted with mentoring other students either because their own mentors were unavailable or because they wanted a different perspective on a difficult situation. In addition, I have mentored both adjunct and new faculty at GGC, drawing on my own experiences to help them become more effective college instructors.
In addition to mentoring, I help students learn to be responsible members of the broader community. I routinely work with the Technology Ambassadors Program and the Federal Work-Study program to recruit students to serve as judges at the regional, super-regional, and state FIRST Lego League competitions for middle school students. I serve on the Sustainability Committee and actively promote the importance of environmental stewardship both within and outside of the classroom. I have proposed using the aforementioned telescope purchase to improve the school’s engagement with the surrounding community. This semester, I assisted the Student Center with voter awareness, and I volunteered for a voter registration drive. I stressed to my students the critical importance of being a responsible citizen, and I provided the students with information on early voting times and locations. I have also started the process of making GGC an early voting location for the 2018 election.
Conclusion
Teaching has become a central part of my life. I firmly believe that the best way to improve our community and our world is through education, and I am honored to have been a part of this field throughout my adult life. Teaching–especially in technology–is an ever-changing field, and I am constantly looking for new approaches to try in my classroom. I continue to educate myself on both technology and pedagogy daily, and I am always finding ways to improve the educational experience for my students, both within and outside the classroom. I am looking forward to continuing in this field for many years to come.