text: Experience, Values, Goals & Methods, Future
  Working as a dance educator has opened my eyes to a world of artistic engagement that has ultimately bolstered my personal growth, deepened my love for dance, and provided me with numerous opportunities to interact with and contribute to communities at home and abroad. Over the past 16 years I have worked with fellow artists, organizations, and educational institutions to explore how dance can address their communities' unique interests, needs, and goals. This includes academic dance programs in higher education; recreational and pre-professional studio programs for children, teens, and adults; in-school and out-of-school dance residencies with K-12 populations; collaborative programs with social service and community organizations; and international programs and cultural exchanges in Ghana and Vietnam. All of these experiences have affirmed my belief that dance is a way of being in the world, a mode of learning, a means for celebrating personal identities and cultural heritages, and a process for connecting and building communities.
  I believe that by creating challenging yet nurturing learning environment and facilitating student-centered learning, dancers can build on their strengths, explore their boundaries, and push to new heights in their creative development. Individual and collective student-led inquiry allows for dancers to generate deeper understanding of their relationship to concepts and artistic material; experience their own agency and self-determination in the learning process; and clarify their role in establishing and supporting their artistic education community.
  I endeavor to make opportunities accessible for all who wish to dance. I strive for dance students to feel secure and motivated to take risks by providing opportunities to express their unique identities. When students acknowledge and affirm their own strengths, I echo that with verbal feedback, reflect their accomplishments by giving them progressively complex tasks, and encourage them to explore approaches that are new to them. I strive for dance students to feel engaged through multi-sensory experience by teaching to a range of learning styles. Uniting movement with dialogue, writing, reading, drawing, watching performance, and exploring objects and natural or man-made environments, fully engages students in the dance experience. I strive to help dance students create deep connections to their environments and to each other. Presenting them with challenging activities facilitates the development of decision-making and problem-solving skills. When facing these challenges with peers, they are able to explore new perspectives, enhance group awareness, and develop an ethos of collaboration as well as the ability to adapt according the dynamic of partners and environments.
  Every teaching engagement provides unique rewards and challenges. I honor the educator's role in social change, facilitating whole-person development through which students can better understand themselves and the world, helping to forge pathways through which students can negotiate an oft turbulent society. I understand that this role can be detrimental if not approached critically and with an ethics of care and responsibility. As an educator, I approach every student-teacher encounter as an opportunity to learn and hone my craft, and to discover how I can challenge my own assumptions and broaden my perspective. I understand dance education as a reciprocal learning process, and a right for all who seek to access it. I am grateful for every moment, past, present, and future.