Nine Years in Higher Education · NAU · Coconino Community College
In the Classroom, Everything Connects
Nine years teaching at the college level — designing courses, shaping reading lists, and building the kind of classroom where students learn to think across disciplines, write with precision, and trust their own ideas.
I taught at Northern Arizona University's Honors College and at Coconino Community College — across disciplines that included art history, humanities, and composition. The courses ranged from foundational writing seminars to a topic-based Honors course I designed from scratch. What connected them was the same instinct that runs through everything else I do: find the thread, give people a framework, and trust them with more than they expected.
Some courses I designed end-to-end. Others I delivered within a common framework, shaping the intellectual focus — the theme, the reading list, the questions we followed — while working within shared requirements. In every case, the classroom was a place where the material mattered and the students were taken seriously.
The Same Thread, Every Time
Whether the subject was food in Western art, human resilience in literature, or American cultural identity, the goal was always the same: give students a lens they could actually use. Not just for this course — for the next one, and the one after that.
The best classroom discussions happen when the material is specific enough to be surprising and universal enough to feel personal. That balance — between the particular and the portable — is what I was always building toward.
Selected Courses
HON 291 · Northern Arizona University Honors College
Fierce Food in the Arts
Course designed by Gamin Summers
A seminar I conceived and built from scratch — tracing food as artistic subject matter across 30,000 years of Western art history, from prehistoric cave paintings to Warhol's soup cans to haute couture. Students wrote personal food essays, formal painting analyses, research papers, and annotated bibliographies. The premise was simple: food is the one subject that's simultaneously universal and deeply personal, which makes it the perfect lens for understanding everything from the Dutch Golden Age to Dada to consumer culture. Writing-intensive, discussion-based, and genuinely hard to forget.
HON 190 · Northern Arizona University Honors College
Beyond Adaptability to Triumph
Theme and reading list designed by Gamin Summers
A foundational Honors seminar in critical reading, analytical writing, and oral communication — taught across multiple sections each semester, with each instructor shaping the intellectual focus of their own section. This section was built around a single animating question: what does it look like when human beings exceed what they thought possible? The reading list — Nordberg, Frazier, Kingsolver, Patchett — answered that question across geography, history, gender, and circumstance, and rewarded the kind of close, cross-disciplinary reading Honors students are asked to practice.
ART 100 · Coconino Community College
Art Appreciation
Creative input in course design, activities, and assessments
Art Appreciation is often the only art course a student takes in their life — which made it the most important one to get right. This section was built around the conviction that looking at art is a learnable skill, not an innate gift. Students didn't just study works in reproduction; they encountered them in person through gallery and museum visits, and student-created projects put the making alongside the looking — because understanding what it takes to produce something changes how you see it.
HUM 235 · Coconino Community College
American Arts & Ideas
A survey of American cultural development — arts, literature, philosophy, and religion from the Colonial Period through the present — organized around the concept of "encounter." Rather than a march through chronology, the course asked students to look at how cultures intermingling brought change, reinvention, and fluidity to American identity. The differences that might seem to separate us, examined closely, tend to overlap and intertwine into something new.
Also taught at Coconino Community College
ART 101: Art History I · ART 102: Art History II · ENG 101: Composition I · ENG 102: Composition II
Good Learning Design Starts With Actually Knowing How to Teach
Nine years in the classroom taught me what works in a learning environment — and what doesn't. If you need eLearning or training that actually teaches, let's talk.
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