Dustin Kidd – Teaching Philosophy – From Play to Art The building blocks for my courses are play, voice, empathy, understanding, and art. Play Adults need to play as much as children do. We often forget that. The classroom should include opportunities for tinkering, practicing, and experimenting. Play is written into most of my assignments. For instance, in my increasing use of social media in the classroom, I ask students to spend time playing—reading, following, and randomly posting—before they jump straight into performing the assignment. Voice Being creative and communicating are natural parts of the human experience, but we all learn to communicate in specific ways for specific settings. So we have to constantly learn to understand our own voices in a variety of communication types—from email to tweets, from formal papers to memos. I work closely with my students on discovering their voices in these different settings and I use iteration as the central tool fo...
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