I teach to raise global awareness and augment community engagement. My pedagogy emphasizes reflexivity and a multiplicity of perspectives and modalities, with the goal to close the gap between academic and applied knowledge through critical (media) making and design-level thinking.
During my fellowship at the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College, I experimented with digital pedagogy. I designed and implemented student-centered multimodal research projects: Sounds of Learning and Oxy Music Connection. I also maintained a blog series on digital pedagogy featuring the Mixtape Assignment and mobile music-making. My pedagogical experimentation with sound and technology culminated in my Digital Music-Cultures course, offered in spring 2013.
MUSI112 Digital Music-Cultures is an entry-level, first-time course offering in the Music Department at Occidental College. Combining principles of ethnomusicology and digital audio production practices, this course provides a critical and hands-on environment for students to explore how music as “digital vernacular” creates a sense of place and identity in the increasingly globalized world; how social, media, and technological institutions organize 21-century music participation at the grassroots, independent-level. [Course site]
Upon an invitation to join the adjunct faculty at Art Center College of Design, I led graduate workshops on ethnography and advised MFA students in Media Design Practices.
Using multidisciplinary methods and theories from scholarship on music, media, culture, and history, I have designed and taught seven undergraduate courses at University of Virginia and Occidental College.
COMP155 Web Design & Programming is an entry-level, first-time course offering in the Computer Science minor track at Occidental College. I co-taught and co-desigend this two-unit course with Daniel Chamberlain, the director of Oxy’s Center for Digital Learning + Research. This course introduces and critically situates the concepts required to design, build, and program an interactive web site. With a fundamental understanding of the history and practice of web design in place, students develop their skills through collaborative project work aimed at producing a set of live web sites. This synthetic approach to webmaking allows students to develop a critical understanding of this fundamental medium, a facility with the methods and techniques of web design, and an appreciation for the computational and algorithmic systems the underlie modern technological (and social) systems. [Course site]
SWAG1440 Gender and Race in Popular Music, an entry-level survey course offered twice in the Study of Women and Gender Department at the University of Virginia, provides an environment for students to explore issues intersecting race, gender, and popular music via a multi-disciplinary and multimedia engagement with musical sound and culture. Through scholarly and popular readings, and reflective assignments such as the “mixtape” project and the concert report class blog, students engage with their own, immediate popular music worlds in critical and reflexive ways. [SWAG1440 sample syllabus]
As an upper-level undergraduate seminar, MUSI4510 Music in Asian America asks: What is the relationship between music and “Asian American” identity? More broadly, what is “Asian America” in the musical life and cultural imagination of the United States? Engaging with intensive reading, writing, and final student projects, this seminar investigates the musical sounds, icons, lives, and practices in Asian American communities in the United States in 20th and 21st century. [MUSI4510 sample syllabus]
Other courses:
MUSI207/307 World Music: Popular Music and Transnationalism
[MUSI207/307 sample syllabus]
MUSI207 Race and Ethnicity in Popular Music
[MUSI207 sample syllabus]
MUSI/SOC255 Digital Vernacular Music-Culture
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