Backpack Educator

 Writer Ted Conover wrote in his book The Routes of Man, “I have benefited enormously from formal education, [but] it has never seemed to me sufficient; it has repeatedly sparked in me a visceral longing for the lessons of life outside.”  So too can this be said about teaching outside of the traditional classroom environment. Presenting an online course of Asian art from Asia, or Indigenous Art from Peru, engages students in their learning while inspiring them to travel the world themselves.

Some postcards from my global classroom

The Challenge of Education

A study of the humanities is akin to travel. We explore a place or subject, with or without a goal or itinerary, and we end up discovering who WE are. Like travel, our learning never reaches a final destination. Many of the students at the college where I teach, like their grandparents from the 60s once claimed, want to create real change for the world. Or, more often, to disrupt the old ways of doing something. Higher Education is one area where we need to reassess not just how but where students learn. I suggest that before the problem can be fully solved, we need first to understand why we seek change. That is the advantage of blended subjects, a re-contextualization of ideas that help direct the learner to solutions that they figure out rather than hearing in a lecture. This results in a cultivation of communities rather than an arrangement of a classroom.

In this downloadable .pdf file I give a brief history of my global travels and how I came to teach online art history from around the world for the Art Department of the College of Southern Nevada.

Travel and Teaching Webites