Grounded in the belief of a world of many worlds—be they constructed by self-organized cultures and groups or by idiosyncratic individuals—my pedagogical approach meets students as existing world-builders, witting or unwitting. I see students not as slates to be broken down and cleared before being rebuilt in the image of a prototypical designer, as many design pedagogies do, but rather as individuals with rich backgrounds and value systems to be examined, challenged, and ultimately cultivated into unique and personal voices of design expression. I aim to do this at all levels of instruction. From first year studios to mid-career seminars to final semester research studios, I ask students to study and question their assumptions and dispositions before establishing a conceptual stance in developing final projects. How this is achieved is based on the course and level of student, resulting in wide recognition through numerous national ASLA student awards, CELA student awards, and a built project as a part of the Beijing Garden Festival.

Key educational objectives sampled across syllabi that help to render my larger philosophy of teaching include:​

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• Develop a vocabulary of tactics to challenge or subvert conventional, often Western, methods of knowledge production, to value, expand, and synthesize other ways of knowing.

• Discover, develop, and render a uniquely individual practice as one provocative worldview, among many, for alternative and just futures.

• Situate the role of architectural and ecological design as necessarily in coalition with socio-political and activist framings to catalyze change.

• Gain fluency in employing representational tools and techniques—of both analog and digital origin—as not only illustrative but as investigative and generative means to probe experience and phenomena across place, space, and time in pluriversal world-building.

• Foster new immersive representational methods to dynamically engage a diverse and increasingly digital public.

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First year studio is where we challenge the students’ very concept of landscape architecture, requiring them to pursue an often highly personal or particular perspective to the foundational elements of landscape making. My seminars have largely employed the tools of game engine software—rapidly growing in use and application across many industries, yet largely absent in design education—where students inhabit different bodies and modes of perception in virtual real-time environments. In my inaugural, field-based research studio located at UVA satellite site, Milton Airfield, students are tasked with physically embodied learning through fieldwork and situated making, intimately engaging with the dynamic media of landscape itself over a semester’s seasons, contesting the now hegemonic abstractions of computers and digital computation in contemporary landscape practice.