TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My primary objective as a teacher is to activate a growth mindset in each of my students, expanding their learning capacity and setting them on a path of lifelong independent learning. This means that I need to ensure the classroom is a supportive and safe space in which all student voices are heard, valued, and respected so that they may take creative risks.
I view my courses as living organisms in which I provide a framework of goals and objectives while remaining responsive to the development of the classroom environment and my students’ creative interests. My role is to guide the trajectory of learning, ensuring progress through specific learning outcomes while attending to my students’ interests and tailoring to their creative concerns and inquiries. This leads to a higher level of curiosity and engagement in the curriculum by deepening the exploration into their conceptual interests balanced with the practice of technique.
My teaching practice is rooted in culturally responsive pedagogy in order to support all of my students and create an inclusive and stimulating classroom environment. I prioritize building a rapport with each student through individual conversations, provide “wise feedback” to respectfully challenge them beyond preconceived limitations, and develop each student’s self-efficacy in the pursuit of their creative endeavors and education. Peer-to-peer learning along with opening up parts of the curricular decision process are used to elevate student voices. I find that students feel more agency and responsibility in their learning and become more active learners when they are invited into the curricular development process.
Maintaining my own creative practice and engagement in the creative community outside of the classroom is essential to the advancement of my artistic skills brought into the classroom and in the mentorship of students as they enter the field professionally. My artistic practice is diverse—ranging from moving image, interactive sound art installation, and photography to painting and writing—and supports a gamut of creative endeavors my students may explore. I have taught at universities, private colleges, and art colleges in media art, filmmaking, graphic design, and cinema history. Within moving image, I am able to support coursework in experimental, expanded cinema, documentary, essay film, and narrative film production, in addition to cinema studies and history. When teaching history I focus not only on the technical and aesthetic advancement of the medium, but also the historical, cultural, and political moment, forms and politics of representation, and development of the film industry and canon.
The classroom is a space of reciprocal learning in which the students learn from the instructor and each other, and the instructor learns from the students. It is necessary to the vitality of the classroom as an incubator for creative activity and exploration that the instructor is open to learning from their students and actively listens. It is deeply rewarding to see a student open up and flourish creatively, to watch as they progress in their studies, and hear about their accomplishments after graduation. It is always an honor to be part of that process.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
St. Olaf College
Fall 2020–Present
Foundation New Media: Students are introduced to a variety of software and hardware to learn the basics of working with recorded media, including video, sound, and photography, as well as developing critical language for discussing media and media artists. Students will employ concepts and techniques in media art production and practice, operate DSLR cameras for capturing still and moving images, edit and manipulate recorded images and sound using Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and Audition, and employ basic lighting techniques for documenting artwork and for media production.
Graphic Design: Throughout this course students investigate graphic design as a tool for effective visual communication. Using both analogue and digital platforms, students explore the basics of typography, layout, color, and images to create communication materials. Students will demonstrate technical aptitude of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, demonstrate understanding of design principles covered in class, fully develop materials through design workflow, investigate aesthetic and historical relationships in design work, engage in critical dialogue, and professional present projects produced individually and collaboratively.
Digital Filmmaking: This course focuses on the creative use of digital video. Students study all aspects of production from concept to screening, including idea generations, pre-production planning, storyboarding, lighting, shooting, editing, and sound design. Students regularly screen, analyze, and discuss contemporary and historic examples of time-based media. During the semester students produce a variety of short digital films, exploring experimental, narrative, and documentary approaches.
Augsburg University
Fall 2024–Present
Film Sight and Sound: This is a beginning-level production course that explores the language of film by way of its aesthetic roots, technological history, and the vocabulary associated with visual storytelling. Students will analyze scenes at the shot-by-shot level while learning the creative potential of the moving image. Students then incorporate these lessons into their own work.
Issues in Contemporary Cinema: This course examines cultural, artistic, commercial, and theoretical concerns that occur in world cinema today. The intention is to help students both contextualize the cinema they see in appropriate and insightful ways, and to provide a sophisticated critical apparatus to help them read films as texts and to interpret the cinema’s larger societal value and impact.
Producing for Film and Television: This course investigates the role of the producer in film and television: to create, organize, and manage productions. Students will learn every step of the producing process from shaping the story, budgeting and scheduling the day-to day activities, legal and rights management, to marketing and distributing the finished work.
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Fall 2018–Present
Faculty Senate Member 2022-2023: The Faculty Senate is a representative body of the faculty and is responsible for promoting faculty discussion on matters of concern to the faculty. As a body, the Senate communicates and proposes ideas, policies, and procedures to the administration with regards to faculty life, curriculum issues, and more.
Foundation: Media I: Students are introduced to digital resources at MCAD while exploring digital media. Areas covered include the Service Bureau, Gray Studio, Black Studio, and Media Center, along with other digital resources. Students use a variety of software and hardware to learn the basics with recorded media, including video, sound, and photography, as well as developing critical language for discussing media and media artists.
Introduction to Filmmaking: This course is an introduction to telling stories in film. It introduces historical and critical issues of film language, and provides a theoretical and technical foundation for future work. Principles of cinematography and continuity editing are applied through assignments in the forms of documentary, narrative, and experimental digital video. Technical processes and practices demonstrated include preproduction planning, shooting, basic lighting, sound recording and mixing, and digital edition. Equal attention is availed to technical and artistic concerns in screenings, lectures, discussions, technical demonstrations, and evaluations. Each student develops their own creative work through the completion and critique of individual and group projects and exercises.
Metro State University
Fall 2024–2025
Make Some Noise: Sonic Environments in Film: Since the early days of cinema, sound has played a part in the film experience: from musical accompaniment, live narration, and talkies to contemporary sound design and effects. In this special topics course, we will look at the history and evolution of cinematic sound, the significant narrative role of sound, playful and experimental applications of sound, and the perceptual and psychological dynamics at work in sound design.
Designing to Transgress: Posters and Protest: Looking at historical and contemporary applications of political posters, this current topics course explores the use of poster design to challenge the status quo, demand change, and create awareness. Each week you will pair design concepts with current events in the creation of posters with purpose.
Excluded Voices in American Cinema: This course centers the cinematic art from communities historically excluded from mainstream American cinema: Indigenous Cinema, Black and African-American Cinema, Women-led Cinema, Asian-American Cinema, Latinx-American Cinema, Queer (LGBTQ+) Cinema, Disability Cinema, among many others. We will discuss the causes of this suppression, study reports and statistics, discuss intersectionality, explore the effects this exclusion has had on American society, and analyze the barriers to inclusion. Past the history into the present, we will study films from the New Wave of Diversity in 21st Century American Cinema, explore the equitable aesthetics, and highlight equitable producing, financing and distribution options for filmmakers who are disabled as well as for Women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ filmmakers.
Film Production and Editing: This course introduces the principles and practices of electronic filmmaking as a personal and creative art form. Students will engage in exercises and project to explore and understand editing, camera work, light, composition, and sound. A variety of cinematic forms will be examined. Student screenplays may be produced. Students will film and edit individual creative projects.
Minneapolis Community and Technical College
Spring 2023–Fall 2023
Cinema History I: Introduction to history, theory, and criticism of cinema from its origins in the silent era through the sound era of Classical Hollywood, German Expressionism, Russian Montage, and French Poetic Realism. The course examines cinema as a unique art form in the context of the arts and the American and European social milieux. Films are analyzed in their historical positions, national origins, and aesthetics.
Cinema History II: Study of the history of film language and style, beginning with the transition from the classical studio system to American Film Noir, Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, Czech New Wave, New German Cinema, International Co-Production, Japanese Cuban, and African Cinema, to contemporary American Independents.
St. Cloud State University
Fall 2022
Digital Narrative Filmmaking: This course provides in-depth study of narrative film storytelling and professional production. Assignments strike a balance between theory and practice to reveal the relationship between the art and craft of filmmaking. Students design and utilize pre-production and post-production workflows, demonstrate knowledge and skill in digital cinematography, sound design, and editing, employ lighting techniques, and evaluate the history of cinematic style and the language of narrative film.
TRAINING
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Fall 2023: In this institute, we will have the opportunity to examine how well our current practices align with the central tenets of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. CRP advocates that good teaching draws on the knowledge and skill our students bring to the classroom, creates supportive relationships that allow students to take learning risks, and prepares students to challenge barriers to their full flourishing. In this course we will give and get support for deepening our current CRP practices and/or implementing new ones, through reading articles, watching videos, completing self-assessments and reflections, and participating in activities and discussions with peers.
Unleasing Creativity, Increasing Flexibility: Teaching Interim Online, Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts, St. Olaf College: recommendations for online practice, cultivating community and “presentness”, encouraging and leading discussion, assigning and organizing group work, high and low stakes assessments, designing online course content for clarity and accessibility.
Anti-racism, Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) and St. Olaf College: screening and discussion of “1 Angry Black Man” with filmmaker Menelek Lumumba and Stephanie Jones, Assistant Professor of Education at Grinnell College and ACM Faculty Fellow.
New Faculty Orientation, Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts, St. Olaf College: hybrid/online teaching concepts and best practices, exploring Moodle and assessing student learning, the flipped classroom, small group team work, inclusive and efficient evaluation practices, strategies for inclusive classrooms, equity and inclusion: challenges at St. Olaf.
Building Community Online, Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts, St. Olaf College: longitudinal and spontaneous group work, creative multiple levels of accountability, setting a classroom environment conducive for community, communication and online tools, peer and self-review, cooperative learning practices, making class fun.
MCAD Covid-19 Summer Teaching Institute, Minneapolis College of Art and Design: Priming the Canvas: teaching with Canvas, navigation, course templates, organizing course materials, grading, assignments, discussion function, speed-grader, online quizzes/tests, tools for communication, video creation with Canvas Studio; creating demo videos training in best practices, tools, accessibility Speaker Series: Reflections on Teaching Remotely in the Age of Covid.
Online Course Consulting with Instructional Designer, Cate LaPlante: one-on-one review of online course content, structure, and flow.
The Big Conversation: The Past in the Present, a Personal Journey through Race, History, and Filmmaking, 2021 Sundance Film Festival: “History is not the past, it’s the present.” James Baldwin’s words reverberate throughout Raoul Peck’s work, his activism, and his remarkable filmmaking career. Peck joins Festival director Tabitha Jackson in a conversation about white supremacy, history, creative expression, and his personal journey from the Academy Award–nominated I Am Not Your Negro to his upcoming work Exterminate All the Brutes, which interrogates over 600 years of history— from the Native American genocide, to the systemized enslavement of Africans, to Hitler’s extermination of the European Jews—a history to which our present is inextricably bound.
The Big Conversation: Barbed Wire Kisses Redux, 2021 Sundance Film Festival: The year 1992 was a watershed one for LGBTQ+ film, giving birth to the term “New Queer Cinema” and introducing a revolutionary generation of films and filmmakers with energetic irreverence and disruptive aesthetics. At the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, B. Ruby Rich convened and moderated a panel of preeminent artists (including the late Derek Jarman) to discuss their work and the historic moment of its emergence. This year, Rich and other LGBTQ+ titans gather 30 years later to look back and imagine forward in this contemporary edition of Barbed Wire Kisses.
Speakeasy: Conjuring the Collective: Womxn at Sundance, 2021 Sundance Film Festival: a virtual speakeasy featuring performances from an array of talented womxn from the Festival and beyond, honoring a multiplicity of perspectives through our myths and stories, dance, art, music, and culture. Theater directors nicHi douglas and Annie Tippe collaborate on creating unique ways to bring womxn together and creatively respond to an intentional prompt for 2021.
The Big Conversation: The Story of Us, 2021 Sundance Film Festival: Legal scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé W. Crenshaw moderates a conversation including Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, Princeton University Professor Ruha Benjamin and Yale University Professor David W. Blight, about the construction, dissemination and deployment of the grand narrative of the United States, and the critical role of independent media in its retelling.
Power of Story: Speculative Fiction is the Place, 2021 Sundance Film Festival: “Speculative thought is important, and unless you are doing speculative thought, you are not doing any thought at all.” —C.L.R. James
Black speculative fiction and historiography, Afrofuturism, and utopian/dystopian visions speak to an enduring, evolving, and vibrant storytelling sensibility. They also speak to the many generations of Black artists whose practice and work—across music, cinema, literature, design, fashion and other arts—re-envision the future.
A group of artists reflects on storytelling forms that reframe Black experiences through imagined or alternative narratives connecting the people, technology, culture, and collective memory of the African diaspora.
The Big Conversation: Come Together, 2021 Sundance Film Festival: That the first image of a black hole was achieved through a global network of synchronized radio observatories shows what humans can accomplish when we come together. Beyond astronomy and across a myriad of fields—from space exploration and climatology to bioscience and virology (as the pandemic plainly illustrates)—science and technology are propelled by collaboration, cooperation, and the breaking of barriers. We explore, through the lens of film and television, what that cooperation means for human knowledge and our mutual survival.
State of Progress: a Reflection on 2020’s Equity Deals and Tangible Results, Alliance for Action at 2021 Sundance Film Festival: 2020 was a watershed year that illuminated the need for industry-wide change and progressaround DEI work. What does it mean to turn good intentions into actionable anti-racist practices? What influence do independent film exhibitors, including art house cinemas, film festivals, and distributors have in shaping in the evolving landscape? What collective resources do we have to create change, and how are we using our existing resources to address these issues? How are relationships with groups already doing this work being fostered?
Kelsey Bosch 