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joseph squier
6. Teaching as Making
For me, teaching was never separate from making. It was another form of attention, another space where inquiry unfolded.
In the classroom, as in the studio, I asked: What are we paying attention to? What are we carrying with us? What stories are we avoiding, and which ones are asking to be told?
Teaching was never about giving answers. It was about creating a space where students could ask better questions, ones that were personal, contradictory, unresolved. I encouraged them to see their lives not as obstacles to overcome but as material to explore. Not in a confessional sense, but as a way of understanding what drove them: What are you drawn to? What repels you? What image or phrase keeps returning, unbidden? What does it all mean? Is there an image vocabulary to express this?
I tried to model vulnerability without performance. I told my students that uncertainty wasn’t a flaw in the process, it was the process. The goal wasn’t to arrive at resolution, but to learn how to stay present with complexity, to trust ambiguity, to work through discomfort instead of around it.
Over the course of my teaching career — at the University of Illinois, the University of Nevada-Reno, and beyond — I watched students transform. Not just in technical skill or confidence, but in their relationship to their own voice. I saw them discover that attention is a kind of power. That making art isn’t just about producing artifacts, it’s about reshaping perception, revising memory, challenging language and building new vocabularies. It’s about giving shape, form, and presence to the invisible.
When I taught, I didn’t want students to mimic my process. I wanted them to discover their own. I wanted them to fail and revise and surprise themselves. I wanted them to leave the room more awake to the world than when they entered.
That was the gift teaching gave me: the chance to witness that kind of unfolding, again and again.