My first experience of this was when I taught painting and drawing at the downtown San Francisco Senior Center several years before completing my BFA.  Several of my students had been schoolteachers before retiring.  It was then that I realized that teaching is more collaboration then didactic activity.  We all learned a great deal in those years.

At UCSC, I have been teaching ?Art21, Introduction to Computer Art.?  This class is a studio art class that introduces students to the fundamentals of writing HTML (computer code) to enable them to design web pages.  It also teaches the related necessary skills of digital imaging, image compression, compositing, and animation.  It also covers some history and theory of net.art, develops skills in critical viewing of actual net.art and web art projects, and lastly and most importantly, teaches students to produce a work of web based art.  

In the course of this class, I have worked with students from art, economics, computer science, history, biology, sociology, and other disciplines.  Some of the students are computer illiterate while some have been programming for years.  Some have already begun to explore the web as a medium for creative expression; for others this is their first contact with contemporary art.  I have classified the material covered in my class into three gross categories: Art Theory and Appreciation, Art Studio, and Technical Expertise.  Proficiency in these areas varies greatly among these students.  This imbalance of skills carries a number of unique challenges, which I am constantly trying to address.  How does one teach a computer programmer or an economist to understand and make contemporary art?  How does one excite an artist about the possibilities of art on the Internet when they are still struggling with checking their email?  In working with students with widely varying proficiencies, I try to apply the concept of ?servant-leadership? as pioneered by Robert K. Greenleaf: the best test of ?servant-leadership? is to ask, do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous; and are they more likely to become servant-leaders themselves?  In practical terms I try to de-emphasize traditional modes of control and accountability in the forms of deadlines and exams, preferring instead that students realize the usefulness of assignments as a way to solidify and integrate knowledge and information.

I also try to incorporate in my approach to teaching the concept of multiple intelligences developed by Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University.  I have adapted his ideas by trying to provide multiple points of access for each of the areas we cover in class.  Specifically I have tried to address three groups of people or three types of intelligences; those who are intuitive and visually oriented, those who are literary minded and intellectual, and those who are mostly technically oriented and enjoy solving challenges.  There are a few ways in which I have been able to use these ideas to support my teaching at UCSC:

For students who lack a technical background of aptitude I translate technical explanations into visual models and analogies of everyday experiences.  Many people do not easily relate to absolute and relative Uniform Resource Locators (URL) as paths to directories on computer networks (web site addresses).  Most people do relate to giving directions to someone on how to retrieve an envelope from a file cabinet in an office on campus.  By extending the ideas of everyday life and the desktop metaphors to the Internet, students easily understand the need to give consistent (uniform) direction to items (resource locations).  This method of teaching has proven very effective in demystifying the computer.  The result has been that many students who had expressed dislike or fear of computers have left my class feeling empowered to use computers to make art and even, excited by their own successes, pursue more advanced topics in digital art production.

Instead of demanding that all students interact exclusively with each other in class, I have set up online discussion groups, provided ways for students to email each other and allowed for discussions using online chat and white boards.  This allows for students with less confidence, lower verbal skills, or disabilities to participate in the discussions, yet it still allows verbal students to articulate their ideas in class.

For assignments and final projects, I stress collaboration and assign group projects.  This connects groups of students with each other and allows them to draw on each other?s strengths.  Students focus on what they can do instead of what they cannot do.  The resulting projects are usually far beyond the individual students ability and serve to motivate them to produce larger and more ambitious projects.  I have found that a collaborative model of education prepares students to be both students and teachers.  I have also found that this teaches members of the group to empower rather than to compete with each other.  

I have adapted the material I cover in class to follow a textbook I have been assigning as a reference.  This book has a clear and narrative style and is well organized.  In addition, I provide students with web-based resources that are more technical in nature.  It is my experience that while some students learn best from a live person, others prefer a narrative in a book, while yet others excel when given technical documents and specifications.  By allowing for all three points of access, students discover which form of instructional media works best for them, self-awareness that will empower them for a life of learning beyond the classroom.  

Finally, I encourage students to give constructive feedback throughout the quarter, to tailor the class as close as possible to the needs of the group.  Because of this feedback, we now cover more material in the beginning of the quarter and allow for more supervised in-class production time at the end of the quarter while students work on their final project.  

When I think of teaching as social sculpture, I envision blocks of the finest marble, full of potential.  Some sculptors take these blocks and carve their vision into this stone.  However, the masters of sculpture go further.  As each block of marble has a unique structure and quality these master sculptors pay attention to their interaction and are guided by the innate qualities they discover.  Once the famous sculptor Michelangelo was asked how he was able to produce such extraordinary sculptures like the David.  ?Easy, ? he said,? first you look at the stone, see what is inside, only then do you start by carving into the stone and just stop at the skin.?  If this is the result of the interaction between a human being and a piece of stone, how much more extraordinary should our interactions be with each other!

Some educators help shape who or what we become.  In contrast, Kevin Radley, one of my teachers and personal influence, used to say that the biggest thrill of teaching was trying to be sensitive to students and help the person release their creative potential.  In this process, he saw the act of teaching itself as a creative act.  I would like to go even further and say that thought making art the artist also changes, develops, and even matures.  This has also been my experience with teaching, and it is because of the realization that I see teaching not just as a creative act, but also as a practice of personal development.