A good teacher is also a student, who stays critical of his knowledge and is always eager to dive deeper into a subject matter or to broaden his horizon. As an artist, I continue developing and trying new means of expression. Creating personal work helps to keep me up to date, and supplies practical examples to use in class. Teaching in the Visual Arts presents special challenges, as it is balancing act between stimulating artistic development, offering a broader perspective and the training of technical skills.

It is important to provide students with an environment that encourages experimentation and where they feel comfortable enough to express themselves. Within certain boundaries, a student should be able to find hers or his own way and set personal goals. I try to create an atmosphere of trust in which class critiques and one on one discussions can be open and frank. I consider reflecting on the work and its creation, and listening to the impressions it makes on others, to be important means to grow as an artist.

With all the information sources available to them, students get exposed to a massive amount of imagery and new developments. What they need is for that information to be put into perspective. This is a bi-directional process: students will alert me to new developments while I can supply them with more in depth background information and help them to make connections. Cultural awareness of the historical settings in which works of Art are created has to be part of any artist's baggage. I find it a useful teaching tool to offer a historical overview of how things came to be.

When teaching technical subjects I usually work from the general concepts down to the software specific implementations of techniques. I do vary this approach and occasionally start with a very practical example and work my way up. To acquire skills students have to practice a lot. I will usually show how I perform a certain task, so students can learn by example, but the main thing is for them to have a go at it.

Since the challenges of teaching in the Visual Arts are threefold, I give three types of assignments. First there are very specific assignments to train technical skills. The materials to work with are supplied and a well-defined product has to be handed in. Second, to stimulate creative development I give out assignments for which the basic criteria are given but the student has to come up with a plan and set his or her own challenges. The creative process is part of the assignment, class critiques are held to evaluate and stimulate the student's progress. While the technical training exercises are to be completed individually, for the larger "free" assignments I do allow collaboration as long as the roles of individual students are clearly defined. Finally, to get students to look beyond their own workstation, I ask them to research a specific topic and present their findings in class.

In the subjects I teach there is a tension between getting the students to grasp what is behind the software they use and how to utilize it for artistic creation, and what is sometimes called "button pushing". The software used for digital content creation is increasingly complex and it is easy to spend most of the class time teaching the students where to click to accomplish a specific task, leaving little time to reflect on the work and the creative process. To address this issue I am increasingly moving the software instruction on-line, through websites I create and by using Learning Management Systems. I also create instruction videos and post them on-line. I still cover the software instruction in class, but find there is less need to keep repeating the steps also covered in the videos, and I have greatly increased the use of this hybrid approach for teaching "button pushing".

In light of the recent rapid development of machine learning systems, including large language models, often referred to simply as Artificial Intelligence (AI), I need to address the challenges and opportunities the technology offers where teaching and learning are concerned. Assigning assignments that can be completed by a large language model or some diffusion image generator does not make sense. Note that I do not say "no longer makes sense". If pure statistical prediction suffices to successfully complete an assignment, which is in essence what these generative AI systems do, it is not stimulating creativity and critical thinking.

In visual art education, generative AI should not be banned outright. Students will encounter the technology in their professional life, and the systems have been getting dramatically better over the last few years. Experimenting with the technology should be encouraged so student become familiar with the possibilities, but also become aware of its limitations. These machine learning systems are great at recognizing and reproducing patterns. There are many tools being incorporated in software packages like for instance Adobe Photoshop, that automate mundane tasks like making an image tile-able (repeat-able) or subject isolation (masking). When it comes to image generation things get murky. Some of these systems are trained on copyrighted images, on data that is scraped from the internet. Some of this amounts to intellectual property theft. Images generated with such tools are currently in copyright limbo, using them may turn out to a liability. For this reason the visual effects industry is mostly staying away from these image generators beyond the ideation stage. Unless the studio or corporation is big enough to train systems purely on their own IP.

So while students need to be familiar with the technology, they should mostly focus on what machine learning is bad at. It is important for them to develop an eye for good aesthetics, and see the bigger picture. They should be in charge of their creative process. In terms of assignments the advent of generative AI means that process documentation becomes more important. For the students, to not get lost in the flashy quick gratification of instant image creation. And for the instructor to check if the student is indeed master of their process. Currently I do require an AI transparency statement to be submitted with work for which use has been made of AI, specifying how it was used, and in which stage of the process.

In teaching, my goal is to give students the technical and intellectual foundation on which their creativity can thrive, and the problem solving skills to work through any obstacle they may encounter along the way.