Some of the most critical skills needed to work as a planner are the ability to listen, organize and synthesize multiple streams of information, effectively communicate layered concepts and facilitate with a diverse cohort of constituent groups. These skills define my lifelong, less official teaching experiences, and certainly my most recent experience teaching as a Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley. My teaching philosophy frames my application of these skills for reliable learning, deep processing, and critical collective visioning outcomes.

At its core, effective teaching hinges on an ability to relate, encourage individual interests and facilitate accessibility. I believe that a teacher makes what feels inaccessible, familiar and clear through learning the language of those present. I work to coax information about needs, about points of insecurity, about challenges and barriers,  to co-create learning processes that enable me to effectively relate foundational concepts and develop strategies and applications and  as a group.

Through teaching, knowledge can be collectively revealed.

Just planning requires corrective action, remediation, and some legitimate form of collective visioning and just implementation.  Just planning requires a close understanding of the inaccessbility  of  planning systems (which are cultural, infrastructural, economic and political), and close scrutiny of guiding principles, processes, and projects. My aptitude with live facilitation as a process to unpack and order layered issues enables an experience that is iterative, trustworthy, and highly specific to the needs and energies of a given group.

I believe that teaching and learning are about activating a sense of agency, and that information is an actionable artifact of agency.

Willingness to learn and learning “how to learn” is key to my philosophy of ethical, equitable city and regional planning. A common frustration within planning is the realization that traditional tools for learning about communities fail to yield rich results or are insufficient for intended outcomes. Planning is constantly evolving how it learns, but struggles to meaningfully step out of zones of comfort in learning how to learn. 

As a teacher, I lead with honesty, disclosing my positionality and inviting participants to do the same through open-handed check-ins about relevance of the issue or material and initial evaluations about the facilitation process. Transparency of this kind allows for self and collective accountability, and enables me to be responsive to varied experiences in a room.

My application of teaching as a relating and investigative practice goes a long way to ensuring shared understanding and productivity among stakeholders, collaborators, and teammates.