Algonquin College

I’ve enjoyed short-but-sweet opportunities to teach in two communications-based programs at Algonquin College in Ottawa.

In the fall of 2015, I taught Creating Hype to third-year students in the Advertising and Marketing program. The course took a broad look at various ways in which communicators can engage audiences beyond traditional advertising. I drew upon my experiences as former owner of an independent magazine called guerilla to add real-world examples when touching upon topics including public relations, social media, and event marketing.

For the first half of winter term in 2020, I taught a seven-week course called Plain Language Tune Up to second-year students in the Professional Writing program. The course reviewed the core principles of writing in clear and precise plain language and then examined how such writing is best applied across tasks for professional writers, including magazine editing, technical writing, and the design of user experiences.

SPAO

My long and varied relationship with SPAO (School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa) began in the early 2000’s when I was developing content for guerilla magazine and culminated when I served as SPAO’s Director of Development from August of 2014 to February of 2016.

While a SPAO director, my duties included teaching Photographic History and Theory to full-time students in the diploma program. Structured to align with the photographic genres encountered in the diploma modules, the course examined key historic trends, figures, and ideas as they pertain to still life, architecture, landscape, portraiture, and documentary forms of photography.

For the same group of students, I developed and taught a multi-disciplinary course designed to stimulate artistic development called Imagery, Artistry, Identity. This foray into experiential learning challenged students to develop a journaling practice, to sharpen their critiquing abilities, and to develop the skills needed to effectively collaborate on artistic tasks.

The second course I developed for the SPAO diploma program was called Visual Literacy. Here students were encouraged to individualize their interpretive strategies for looking at historical and present-day examples of fine art and photography while applying theoretical ideas to help inform and deepen each student's photographic work.

Saint Paul University

In the fall of 2014, I dove into Photography: Semiology of the Image, taught to third-year students in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Saint Paul University — an affiliate of the University of Ottawa.

Drawing on the curriculum I’d developed to teach Visual Literacy at SPAO, this course involved a handful of textbooks and a basketful of challenging topics, including semiotics, iconology, and art history.

My favorite aspect of the course was its ultimate goal: to help students develop individual “ways of looking” that would inform their understanding of visual culture across all media — a personalized visual literacy that today becomes only more important as our mass and social media experiences accelerate.