Catalyzing a burning desire to know, transforming the unknown into the knowable, and demonstrating the value in the quest for truth are the motifs and goals that I value in my teaching. Confucius once said, “A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.” I teach my students to have the flexibility to juggle past and present, Eastern and Western and, most importantly, passion and critical thinking in order to help them achieve their future goals through their artistic practice.

 

Coming from an Asian culture, but also having spent several years in the United States, my art attempts to explore this distinction between Eastern and Western philosophical thinking. I focus on teaching my students to appreciate the art of moving images from multiple cultural perspectives, hopefully broadening their horizons and allowing them to further develop their own unique perspectives. The Intro to Moving Image course that I designed explores the duality of film theory and practice, looking at films from both Asia and several Western countries in an attempt to appreciate the distinction between Eastern and Western philosophical thinking. It has been my experience that students become more engaged in the process of learning by comparison, allowing them to better appreciate something that once seemed foreign as well as developing a better appreciation of their own culture. Each week’s class is a juxtaposition of two images or ideas from different cultures, resonating with and drawing meaning from each other.

 

Over the past few years, I have also dedicated time to exploring different methods of integrating theory and practice. I’ve developed film and sound production workshops where I adjust the difficulty of the class to the students to ensure the class is getting the maximum benefit from it. I’ve learned that for entry-level students, it’s generally best if the class starts with fundamental concept and tools that they are more familiar with. When the students have a better grasp of the basics, they are in a better position to determine what about the course interests them. I apply this approach in the Introduction to Film and Video course. I start with encouraging students to make a one-minute short video class project by using a camera phone, an ipod, or anything they can think of using to capture moving images. Closing the project with an in-class screening, the students get to see their own first movies almost immediately, with a new appreciation that filmmaking is an ability they already have. At the same time, by means of the in-class screening, the students recognize the creativity of their peers, as well as their own ability to express themselves in this new medium. Students will also develop technical skills through workshops on camera operation, film hand-processing, sound recording, and lighting techniques.

 

Moreover, my experience has taught me that the students learn faster and absorb more by working in groups, both inside and outside of the traditional classroom setting. Keeping this in mind, I divide my workshops into three sections; equipment training, field trips, and discussion. The equipment training section aims to give students the tools they need to make their ideas a reality; field trips allow students to get hands-on experience with the equipment on their own; and the discussion section allows students to share issues they faced or insights they acquired. Moreover, the field trips situate students in various locations, which helps keep the students focused and interested, as compared with a traditional classroom-learning environment. The students’ problem solving ability is also developed, as students encounter difficulties and obstacles in the field they would never have encountered in the safety of a classroom. The teamwork they use on these field trips is a necessity in all kinds of media production, and they would be entering the real world unprepared if they were not forced to develop these skills. According to the class evaluation at the end of the workshops, students all agreed that the field trips were the part of the course that they most looked forward to and which helped them develop the technical skills they learned in the equipment training section.

 

It has been my experience that allowing students to formally present their work helps them tremendously to further consider their own artistic concerns, as well as provoking free intellectual conversation. Keeping this in mind, in the Capstone: Art of Moving Image course in which I am the teaching assistant, and which is designed to allow students to complete a finished project or advanced research in the field, I conduct the class by giving each student individual presentation time followed by open discussion on each other’s work. In the course evaluation, students were all very happy with the feedback from each other, and they agreed that it helps them not only be able to think through their own work but to more helpfully give critical feedback to the work of others.

 

My experience in the classroom also taught me that students can learn more from making their own mistakes than from constantly referring to the teacher. As a teacher, I always welcome mistakes from the students and always encourage them not being afraid of making mistakes when they learn new things. In the darkroom workshops, I’ve had students who mixed the chemicals wrong and ended up having no images on the film. After figuring out what they did wrong, they always say that making and then having to correct their own mistakes gives them a much better conception of the whole process than being micromanaged and doing everything correctly.

 

I always remind myself that being a teacher requires me to constantly be improving both my teaching techniques and my own knowledge of the field. In order to constantly be re-evaluating my teaching techniques, I always read students’ course evaluations carefully and keep developing my course structure and teaching strategies with them in mind. For more immediate course feedback, I usually conduct a short survey after class by asking questions such as “what is the most interesting thing you learnt from today’s class? What is the thing you liked the least about today’s class? Do you like how the course is structured today? Do you have any suggestions?”  I will make small adjustment for the next class based on the suggestions and feedback my students give me. In order to continue to enrich my knowledge, I go to exhibitions and film festivals in my free time and try to take something away from it to share with my students.