“I don’t teach how to make pretty pictures; I teach how to use design as a tool for social good.”
courses i’m teaching
Design Thinking + Systems Thinking: Tools for Innovating the Future
Weaving together frameworks and methodologies from Design Thinking and Systems Thinking students will apply learned skills to their own hands-on project specific to their practice. Taught for students in the Presidio Graduate School MBA/MPA programs, these entrepreneurs and innovators have the potential to map intersectional leverage points that design for impact at individual, community, and cultural levels.
Design Strategy & Systems Thinking for the Climate Crisis
This course examines theories and methods that designers can use to create sustainable and regenerative practices as related to the climate crisis. Thinking beyond recycled plastics and reusable tote bags, this course asks students to think critically about sustainability from a systems thinking perspective as we examine the complexities in our choices of materials, processes, locations, behaviors, production and consumption. Topics covered include: systems thinking, design for behavior change, design ethnography, environmental justice, values based design, circular economies, regenerative futures, speculative design, and design for paradigm shifts.
Design Activism Community Engaged Learning
The Design Activism Community Engaged Learning course explores ways in which designers can use visual communication as a tool to amplify voices that are normally overlooked or underrepresented in today’s culture. By critically examining the surrounding systems and structures of pressing issues, designers have the potential to become positive agents of change. Throughout the semester students work on two major projects. The first is working directly with a community partner organization to provide design services directly to the community. In the second project, students choose an issue that they are personally passionate about and work through a critical design process to create a work for social impact. In both projects, students create real world projects that are displayed in the community.
Fall 2020: Art within Activism - student perspective
Spring 2020: Students Speak up about the pandemic
Fall 2018: Design Activism students make work that make an impact
Senior Design Projects
This course guides students through the creation of a final thesis project that synthesizes what they have learned throughout their tenure in the Design Program at The University of San Francisco. Through ideation, research, writing, prototyping, production, and presentation, students will be expected to place their design work into critical, historical, social, political, cultural, and conceptual contexts. Throughout the semester, students will be charged with understanding and communicating how their chosen project relates to specific audiences and cultural practices. Final projects are exhibited at an off campus gallery in San Francisco.
Highlights from the 2017 This Counts! Exhibition
Video of 2014 Emergence Exhibition
Crafting Handmade Design
From knitting circles and crafting communities to local artisan made goods, contemporary culture has seen a rise in the handmade. Looking beyond the aesthetic trendiness, this course explores the production and theory of contemporary craft as a response to the hyper digital, environmental impact, social identity and political awareness. Crafting Handmade Design introduces students to skills and concepts in using the handmade as a tool for design process and practice. Techniques will be introduced that present the handmade as a means for creating structures and surfaces as well as ornamentation and expression. Lectures and discussions will complement project work to contextualize the practice within current social and political contexts. We will discuss individual and collective identity, labor and commerce, the handmade and digital, and other contemporary issues.
Everything else I’ve ever taught
University of San Francisco | Design Program
Information Visualization
Design Internship
Design Portfolio Lab
Directed Study
Digital Literacy
Visual Communication I
Art Fundamentals
San Francisco State | Department of Design & Industry
Digital Media I
San Jose State University | CADRE Laboratory for New Media
Advanced Digital Video
Contemporary Media Seminar
Introduction to Digital Media
Art as System
University of California, San Diego | Visual Art Department
Digital Imaging
Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT)
Electronic Technologies in Art
Digital Media I: Time, Movement, and Sound
writing about teaching
Learning as Regeneration
The ChatGPT debate should not be about cheating, the real danger is not teaching students how to learn through questioning and connecting.
Feb 10, 2023
The 3 most important words of the semester: How are you?
My students were able to go farther, even during distanced crisis learning, because of the connections we made checking in anonymously, knowing it's OK to not be OK.
July 1, 2021
It’s a scary, exciting and crucial time for us to learn remotely
Our class will be remote, but there’s never been a more urgent time to learn about Design Activism and Sustainable Design
July 2, 2020
Stop calling this Remote Teaching, this is Crisis Teaching
Designers can model an empathetic design process for learning now and in the future
April 7, 2020
Dear Students, Particularly my Seniors
a letter about the unexpected
March 20, 2020
Design Educator Profiles: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer on Slowing Down for Cultural Change
Interview by Kelly Walters for AIGA Design Educators | August 2019
research about teaching
Climate Justice in Design Education
Design Research Society 2024 | Boston, MA | June 2024
Expanding the Lens: Non-Traditional Grading Practices for Inclusive Design Education
AIGA National Design Conference | New York, NY | October 2023
Design Activism: Community Engaged Learning
Imagining America Summit | Providence, RI | October 2023
Crisis Teaching for Unknown Futures Requires Empathy, Systems and Intersectionality
College Art Association | online | February 2021
Teaching the slowness of cultural change in a fast-paced short semester
AIGA National Design Conference | Pasadena, CA | April 2019
Sustainability in the Visual Arts, Design and creative fields
AASHEE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education)
Pittsburgh PA | October 2018
Privilege Power and Community Design
AIGA MAKE, Design Educators Conference | Indianapolis, IN | June 2018
Designfulness: Educating Designers to Mindfully Create
Design Incubation | San Jose, CA | September 2017
Interdisciplinary Teaching to Re-Design the World
AIGA New Ventures: Intersections in Design Education | Portland, OR | September 2014
Code as Craft: Fair Use & Pedagogy (with Joel Swanson)
College Art Association (CAA) | Los Angeles, CA | February 2012
Code: Intellectual Property, Fair Use and Plagiarism (with Joel Swanson)
ISEA 2011 | Sabanci University | Istanbul, Turkey | August 2011
The Latest New Media Pedagogy: The Medium or The Message?
FLUX: Design Education in a Globalized Society
Cape Peninsula University | Cape Town, South Africa | Oct 3-6, 2007
Teaching Contemporary Media: Teaching Software or How to think about Software?
iDMMA | National University Academic Headquarters | San Diego, CA | Nov 9-11, 2006
learning about teaching
Community Engaged Learning & Teaching Fellowship
McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good | 2018-19
Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) Reading & Learning Groups
Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness, and Strengths-Based Leadership | 2020
Teaching Sustainability, Sustainably Teaching | 2019
Feeling Power: Emotions and Education | 2018
CTE and Lane Center's Social Justice Supper Club | 2017
Critical Conversations about ‘Unsustainable’ Race, Class & Gender Privilege
AASHE | Pittsburg, PA | 2018
Implementing Impact: Design for Social Change
School of the Visual Arts, NY | 2015
AASHE Sustainability Across the Curriculum Workshop
AASHE | San Diego, CA | 2010
Bay Area Public Art Academy
Alameda Arts Commission | 2009
teaching awards
Design Educators Award for Scholarly Publication | Design Incubation | 2019
Post Sabbatical Merritt Award | University of San Francisco | 2017
Distinguished Teaching Award | University of San Francisco | 2015
Faculty Team Innovation Grant | University of San Francisco | 2012
fun
Top 10 Zoom Moments of 2020 | University of San Francisco | 2020