Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching is informed by my understanding of how learning occurs, and consequently how I think I can intervene in the student learning and growth process. At the root of my reasoning is a simple observation that does not - surprisingly - come from my background in cognitive science but from personal experience: there are contents that students won't understand, learn and memorize on their own on a sunny Sunday afternoon while recovering from their Saturday evening! Signal processing, advanced algorithmics and software engineering, mathematics and artificial intelligence, or more generally any dense and formal theoretical material is what students need a professor for. It has always been my policy to prioritize the transmission of these contents for which the student autonomy is not sufficient.

On the reverse, there are skills and abstract notions that are hardly transmissible in a traditional academic way: creativity, aesthetic qualities, originality, etc. These are often best delivered through iterative work on projects with individual and individualized critic and feedback. Therefore, all knowledge and skills cannot be taught the same way and it is important to teach in a methodical, dry but clear manner what needs to be presented that way and to have a more dramatic, metaphorical way of transmitting less palpable knowledge or skills when appropriate. Making use of different forms of media, formats and a range of styles is crucial to supplement the traditional classroom lecture format. Surely, teaching at the School for Interactive Art and Technology implies taking advantage of the variety of technologies that are now available for supporting knowledge and know-how transmission and acquisition. We did not wait for COVID-19 to innovate!

More prosaically, teaching involves having appropriate goals for students. One key factor here is to differentiate students according to courses and levels. One can not teach a first-year freshman with the same methods as a doctoral candidate. In the first case, while university students are all adults, the main goal behind the mere transmission of solid, stable knowledge is to teach them what it means to learn in an academic context. In the latter case, this autonomy being (hopefully) already acquired, the focus has to be on pushing the research and innovation skills of the student to their limits. Also, as the student matures (e.g. at the Ph.D. level) the role of the professor progressively shades into the one of a mentor.

These conceptualizations of learning and teaching are the main ingredients for implementing my philosophy of teaching by defining goals for students' development at the intellectual and practical levels. To know whether this is taking place is hard to gauge and takes a certain faith in the process, but the success of our alumni is a testament, at the very least, of their talent ;)