Wide, atmospheric worlds built like a paused film frame, setting mood, scale, and place before a single character enters.

Invented creatures that begin with studies of real skeletal and muscular structure, then ask how that body would move, feed, and survive.

Self-portraits that trade likeness for feeling, using color, mark, and distortion to record an internal state rather than a face.

Familiar places, such as a city, a building, or a landscape, pushed into the future and put under pressure, built with linear perspective, atmospheric depth, and light that carries the story.

Portraits of other people built from gesture and color rather than exact resemblance, loosened until what remains is presence and mood.

Work made by hand, with nothing between hand and surface, in many of the same materials my students would being using.

Loose, gestural paintings that keep the hand visible, where the brushwork, not a tidy finish, is the point.

The history of American education, read through questions of inclusion, equity, and access, alongside the major philosophies behind general and art education.

Coursework combined theory with classroom observation, art integration exercises, and reflection.

How children develop physically, psychologically, emotionally, and socially from kindergarten through grade 12, and how to plan art instruction that fits each stage, including for students with special needs.

Field experience with children in varied settings connected the theory to practice.

Planning and running an art program for grades K-8: age-appropriate methods and materials, classroom management, accommodations for students with special needs, art room safety, assessment, and building reading into art lessons.

Teaching visual art in grades 6-12: secondary content, techniques, materials and safety, classroom management, accommodations, technology, assessment, and teaching students to read, write, and present about art.

How children learn to read and how to teach reading directly and explicitly, with language arts taught through arts integration and children’s literature.

It included field work assisting certified reading teachers in K-8 classrooms.

Twenty-five supervised contact hours, from September 12 to October 4, 2026, assisting and leading art classes for children aged 3 to 8 at Le Petit Musée, under the centre’s visual art teacher.

The project’s goal was to learn to plan and teach within a lesson structure I didn’t design, and to see how the same lesson has to change between a three-year-old and an eight-year-old. The project presentation to a DAE 200 class follows in Winter 2027.

Two eight-week student teaching placements in the Detroit area from January to May 2027, one elementary (K-5) and one secondary, each with a cooperating teacher.

Responsibility builds from observation and small-group work to whole classes, ending with at least three weeks teaching the full day, observed and evaluated by CCS supervising faculty.