My work, my research, and particularly my teaching, is focused on integrating critical and applied interdisciplinary environmental and visual studies

into the learning experience. Consequently, I explore pedagogical techniques that take students out of the classroom and into engaged learning experiences to aid their scholarship and their research.

For example, in the classes that I taught at the University of Florida, I have been able to involve undergraduate youths in the analysis and creation of media that supports community development efforts through applied research projects, discussion groups, writing assignments, and civically-engaged activities.

Since ecological knowledge is passed through the body from generation to generation via religions, rituals, oral histories and daily practices, learning must use the whole body to improve relevance, retention and action. I take this into the curricula through creating experiential labs that use the whole body to feel, sense, smell, and tactilely encounter ecology. Inside of the classroom, I also create activities that attend to engaging students’ varied backgrounds and experiences so that the discussions and activities are founded in the relevance to the varied students’ lives, beliefs and abilities as well as the land where they live and go to school. These techniques often integrate media components.