Curriculum Design & Instruction
I am an empath; I am intellectually curious. These qualities lend themselves well to teaching.
After finishing my MAMC at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, I was given the opportunity to teach in the College in its Department of Public Relations. As with many disciplines, communications has evolved rapidly since the advent of digital. Teaching requires you to be a consummate student. It’s like trying to fix the car while you’re driving it.
PUR 4103: Public Relations Visual Communication
PUR 4103 is the course that launched my teaching career. I began teaching it as an adjunct instructor in Fall 2012, though I had been a teaching assistant for the course during my master’s program.
The curriculum had not been updated since 2005. The text book talked about search directories (what?!), and students were building websites with Adobe Dreamweaver.
I overhauled the curriculum, giving myself an education in visual communication while doing so. I replaced Dreamweaver with WordPress. I spent hours creating tutorials on Adobe Photoshop and InDesign and WordPress. I watched the documentary Helvetica 1,000 times (OK, not really).
The course was a requirement for all public relations majors and included a lecture twice per week with all students, and a 3-hour lab once per week with a maximum of 20 students (I generally taught 3 - 4 labs per semester). I maintained a course blog on WordPress and became known as the “visual communication” person in the College.
My work on this course earned me a full-time faculty position, my task to scale the course for all majors in the College of Journalism and Communications (roughly 400 per semester).
VIC 3001: Sight, Sound, Motion
Sight, Sound, Motion was the outgrowth of a collaborative curriculum committee I served on during the 2013 - 2014 academic year. The visual communication subcommittee audited the College’s current visual communication courses as well as similar courses at comparable universities across the country. Our task was to teach a skills-based course, including Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, to all College majors, roughly 400 per semester.
I co-taught the course with a video production colleague; I taught the visual component, and he tackled video and audio. I created dozens of tutorials on YouTube, as the course offered a fully online section.
COM 3990: Communication for Social Change
When I returned to my hometown and left my teaching position at the University of Florida, I met with the then-chair of the Department of Communication at UWF. He looked at my CV and asked if I would teach a course on communication for social change.
I developed the department’s first curriculum on communication for social change. The students were required to read Public Relations for the Public Good and Switch, and I reference several social marketing texts for lecture, discussion and assignment material.