Welcome.
Thanks for joining me!
If you're here, I believe you value learning. You understand that the deepest engagement is driven by curiosity and wonder. You know gaining mastery comes from both building new skills and mastery and from enjoying the results of what your gains can allow you to create. I specialize in holding space for playful, communicative, and experiential learning.
Whether you are here for instructional design support or materials, seeking new ways of thinking, seeing, doing, and being to meet the needs of your own learners, or investing in your own growth, I'm so thrilled to connect! We are all on our own journeys, but if I've learned one thing, it's that when you have nothing, still you have art.
Let's play!
Crafting Encounters:
Setting up learning by holding space for experience & creation
Impactful learning unfolds through experience. When learners are applying ideas or theories in practical, creative, hands-on ways, they have time to sink in. Students can find edges, push boundaries, question, recognize their need for more learning, and actively participate in and even lead their learning. This kind of learning is best served when educators construct opportunities for students to 'play' in order to acquire new skills, tools, knowledge, and mastery. Holding space for joy, curiosity, & engaging creativity generates deep learning for students through doing.
Arts-Based
Instructional Design
Language arts is the last required art class in modern classrooms. It's not about learning to write an essay, it's about protecting, nurturing, and raising next generations of novelists, playwrights, poets, graphic designers, cartoonists, and yes, essayists.
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It is not enough to study artists: one must be empowered be the artist.
Curiosity-Driven
Curriculum Planning & Delivery
Learning shouldn't kill curiosity and wonder. Playful freedoms exist in the means of communication; there is rarely only one correct answer or thinking pathway or means of response. We transmit messages by text and beyond, using visuals, audio and aural speaking and listening, space, and gesture to get our messages across.
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"Every act of communication is a miracle of translation."
-Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie (Preface)
Growth-Minded
Rhizomatic Learning
Rhizomes are seeds. Like seeds, learning begins from a tiny shoot and becomes rooted, wide-spreading, and fruitful through nurtured growth.
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Thinking of learning in this way allows students to embrace their curiosities and follow their passions. There are as many ways to build a language arts learning pathway as there are texts and creators. We can imagine what is needed to make seeds grow is similarly needed to make skills, knowledge, and attitudes growth: kind words, being watered, set in a little sunshine is to plants as encouragement, celebration, rich materials, and time to soak in new ideas and forms of expression is to students.
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"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
-William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Playful
Escape Fragility through Cognitive Strength-Building
If students can’t ask or explore questions safely in the classroom space – when or where else is this supposed to happen? ​
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Classrooms are safe spaces:​Taking risks and creating opportunities for students to experiment while appropriately supported allows learning to become a pursuit of mastery, of the craft, of the art, or the sublime.
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“No one should have to pass someone else's ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life - along with civic life - dies without the free exchange of ideas. In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think,”​​
-Martinez Valdivia
(as quoted by Lukianoff & Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, 2019, p.93)