Artistic Statement

Teacher Roundtables is a passion project that I started for two reasons. The first is a self-serving reason: the project’s structure allows me to merge my intellectual curiosity for educational topics with my creative desire to make films. The second reason is to facilitate an ongoing sequence of scholarly conversations with educators who are routinely tasked with solving problems in society. As a university scholar-practitioner interested in the intersection of creativity, education, and, more recently, generative AI, I want to connect with other educators who can speak or share experiences on related topics.

Teacher Roundtables emerged during the global pandemic when I observed tremendous creativity on display as K-12 teachers across the grades worked to solve various problems when trying to engage and instruct students from a distance. Although I wanted to explore this topic in a more traditional documentary-style project, the time commitment and resources were not available for me to produce a half-decent project. With the project still in mind, I was fortunate to walk in during lunch to a group of K-12 teachers sitting around a table, reminiscing about their challenges during the global pandemic. I was working with this group at the time on a teacher creativity framework, so naturally, they connected their actions to creativity in the teaching profession. I immediately saw the project emerge, and members of that group have appeared in the first two Teacher Roundtable projects.

As I started to develop the project I thought more about my limitations and resources so I made the commit not to allow productions to take more than a few days of my time each year. This led to a one-day production format set around a roundtable and a commitment to making two versions of each film; the first is a minimal edit that captures the majority of the conversation and features responses from each participant engaged in the discussion. I see this version as not only offering validity by not editing too much out, but also as a tool for emerging scholars in the field. It’s also quick and simple to produce thanks to advances in technology – and I expect it to get even easier with generative AI tools.

The second version of the film is a shortened version that provides context to the discussion by including an opening and closing narration. This is that scholarly perspective, where I get to share my connections while stopping short of expressing too much opinion. The films are designed to engage in an open conversation and not promote or convey a particular perspective over another. I have other roundtable topic ideas and hope to produce one film per year. Please connect on LinkedIn if you are interested in some type of collaboration or if you’d like to host a roundtable at your school. Ultimately, that is my long-term hope, that each of the films, and their clips, can be used by schools to engage their faculty in scholarly conversations that explore various challenges and opportunities that exist in their building.

Finally, these films look like high-quality productions – at least for me – and this is only because of the expertise of the students who come out of the University of Connecticut’s Digital Media and Design program. I am fortunate to continue working with two incredible filmmakers who have helped establish the look and feel of these films and who I hope to continue working with long into the future.