Being primarily trained as a professional architect, and having extensive experience in academia, studio teaching, and research, my teaching aim is developing interactive and action-based environmental design and focusing on studio learning. By interactive, I mean assisting students to both relate to and contextualize the facts delivered in lectures with their current design studios. Through my courses and design studios, I present urbanism, evidence-based learning, promote health and well-being in the built environment, and present concepts of the paradigmatic shift in architectural practice to encourage students to hone their own design philosophy. I believe in the benefits of both independent and group learning, especially in relation to teaching at an undergraduate level. The two facets of architecture, environment, and design should be well integrated within students’ design studio experience in order to help them make symbiotic interconnections between design and practice.

My other strong philosophical stance – evidence-based learning – is to encourage students to study specific action-based phenomena that will assist them to connect their design studio experience within a broader socio-cultural reality. By weaving a critical interdisciplinary approach to the built environment, my pedagogical goals involve promoting reconciliation of the schism between the subjective boundary of the discourse and its social and environmental responsibilities. As an academic, one of my main objectives is to find ways in which my research could address teaching and contribute to contemporary practice. I always use my research findings to update my teaching materials where possible. My pedagogical philosophy is thus precisely based on research-oriented; evidence-based participatory learning that encourages students to reassess the social, cultural, and environmental aspects of their design learning.

At KU and Howard University, I have worked as a studio professor for the Core Architecture, Architectural Engineering, and Architectural Studies Program. I have developed a new graduate design studio for the architectural studies program, which focuses on designing healthy communities and sustainable neighborhoods in order to improve the physical, social, and cultural health of the community. The studio emphasizes harnessing students’ research skills to analyze sustainable urbanism through master plan level proposal, health, and well-being in the built environment and community needs. In addition, I also taught a graduate-level design studio in which I work with students to integrate sustainable urban design, healthy community issues, environmental design, and evidence-based design into a broader, interdisciplinary inquiry. I always encourage my students to be aware of global phenomena that will help them contextualize their studio learning from a broader perspective of social reality. While teaching, I have focused on linking the development of students’ skills in visual and verbal representation, spatial thinking, and tectonics with their ability to observe, understand context, and critically analyze throughout the process of design inquiry.