I’ve been more fortunate than many faculty when it comes to multicultural exposure in the work experience. I currently teach at Portland State University, a large urban university with more than 30,000 students. The majority of our students are non-traditional: returning adults, ex-military, first-generation college, and/or from disadvantaged neighborhoods. As a city, Portland is not very ethnically diverse (although that’s changing), but it is a sanctuary city and it harbors an incredibly diverse collection of lifestyles and backgrounds, and that is apparent every time I walk onto Portland State’s campus.
I’ve worked tirelessly to incorporate that diversity of background and thought into our curriculum. I serve on our school’s Equity and Diversity Committee, where we’ve set a number of ambitious goals addressing systemic racism and promoting inclusivity and equality for faculty, students, and the community. We also strategize for the hiring of BIPOC faculty, and organize a visiting speaker series centered on media activism, in which we bring in BIPOC activists to discuss their work in a variety of media forms, including filmmaking, producing, podcasting, and curation.
For seven years I taught at the most diverse university in the country – one oft-invoked slogan at Temple University is “We’re the Diversity University” – and I never had a class where many different ethnicities, nationalities, gender identities and social and economic classes weren’t represented. It’s not uncommon at Temple to see students from opposite sides of the globe working together, or a privileged student from the affluent suburbs conferring with a student from one of Philadelphia’s inner-city neighborhoods. In one semester, in one small class, I consulted on a large-scale music production project produced by two physically disabled students, supervised a longform documentary by an Ethiopian student, and oversaw projects by a transgender student, a passionately right-wing Republican, and a student whose religion informed every decision in his creative work.
I’ve also been fortunate to teach in a creative course of study. All of my courses are built on fostering creativity, and studies have shown that creativity is greatly enhanced by multicultural exposure. In both the writing and production courses I teach, students are encouraged to share their stories, and to learn from each other. I am always amazed at the willingness of my students to share their lives, and I pride myself on running a classroom in which they feel comfortable to do so. I am excited by the potential of always-evolving digital media technologies to encourage people who would otherwise never have the means to tell their stories to do so, and have those stories seen by wide audiences. At Temple I guided a large-scale student film project called Arts at your Side, which explored the many ways in which the arts enables such disparate groups of people as migraine sufferers, cancer patients, children with spinal cord injuries, and at-risk urban youth to tell their life stories. I also conceptualized and oversaw a feature-length film project called The DiverCity, for which I had students documenting disadvantaged neighborhoods of Philadelphia that rarely receive any attention from the popular media outside of crime reporting. At Portland State, I mentored a transgender student in the development of a screenplay based on her experience of grappling with gender identity through the process of becoming a successful roller derby player. I also mentored an LGBTQ student through the production of a series of dance films exploring race and identity.
My own work is distinctly multicultural, and it has had an enormous impact on my life as an educator. For many years now I have been writing on, shooting photos of, and producing videos about the disparate people of Ireland. My work has explored Irish gender inequality, the rift between the Catholics and the Protestants, the political divide in the north, and the growing gap between the nation’s youth and its older, more conservative generations. I’ve made films about immigration and prejudice, religion and the economy, and the enormous chasm between the haves and have-nots in the Irish social class system.
My passion for all issues Irish led to my appointment as the Director of Temple’s Study Abroad Program in Dublin. In that position, I spent each summer taking a typically diverse group of Temple students to Dublin to study Irish culture and intercultural communication. I’ve also taught documentary filmmaking in Armagh, a gritty village in Northern Ireland that was the seat of the Troubles in the 1970s, and multimedia production and writing in London. More recently, I directed the University of Oregon’s cinema-focused summer program in Dublin. The programs I have designed for Dublin are not the tourist’s vision of the city. I take students to some of the most run-down, formerly dangerous parts of the city – areas that were until recently controlled by druglords and organized crime, areas full of the working poor and recent immigrants from impoverished nations. And in my New York-based study away program through Portland State, I take students into the five boroughs of the city to explore the cultural identities of diverse neighborhoods. At Temple, I co-created a certificate program in Intercultural Communication and Competence.
My students exit my study away programs with an understanding of the diversity and working everyday life of the destination. And hopefully they return home as cultural explorers in their own cities, with open eyes and attentive minds. They return with the knowledge of how to exercise their creative voices as responsible global citizens. With the changing faces of global communication, media and business and with new technologies making the distances between cities, states and nations ever smaller, I believe it is important now more than ever that students learn to function as effective communicators in diverse environments in a global setting, and make the pursuit of social and racial justice central to their studies and their creative work.
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