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It’s the type of schedule that would make most people ready to plop on the couch by night’s end.
Lafayette College’s Adam MacHose works full-time in ITS as the arts campus tech coordinator and teaches multi-media and video skills in “Media Making” as an adjunct.
MacHose, married to his high school sweetheart, Kathleen, also balances fatherhood; he is dad to toddlers Violet, 3, and Jasper, 1.
Wait. There’s more.
MacHose spends about 35 hours per week with Lehigh Valley Dancers, a dance video production organization that he founded and runs. Commonly called screendance in the world of videography, he doesn’t make a penny off the short dance films that he shoots and directs.
His love of screendance and his desire to make sure he stays up to date on filming it are the driving forces behind the hours he volunteers with Lehigh Valley Dancers, which disseminates the films on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
“I’m interested in it as professional development,” he said. “It’s a project I do for scholarly research; I think practicing filmmaking is important if you’re going to teach it.”
In the end, the dancers benefit because they want to be filmed, MacHose gets to fulfill his desire to better himself as a videographer and as a teacher, and Lafayette students are exposed to a professor who drenches himself in the latest filming techniques.
“I’m pretty close to my dream job,” MacHose said. “I love what I do. Right now I can’t really think of a way to improve it. I’m learning every day. I really enjoy working with the faculty and ITS department.”
And MacHose values his students. It’s why he’s so particular about his teaching method. Before getting his master’s degree in studio art from the Maine College of Art, MacHose graduated from the Hartford Art School in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in painting and was hired as an adjunct. It’s where he developed his foundation for his teaching method.
“I like to give a lot of creative control to the students,” he said. “I have the students design their projects based on their values. My teaching mostly involves group sessions in class and one-on-one discussions with them. I’ve been teaching for a long time, and it seems to be the more effective route in terms of their development. I see faster improvement when you can relate to a student and get to know them so they are engaged in what they are doing. If they don’t care about what they’re doing, they aren’t going to learn anything.
“I’ve never taught from a textbook. I don’t find them helpful. I would rather talk to the students and then have them talk about what they are making.”
What’s impressive is how much MacHose has learned about film, something he was not trained in. MacHose focused on painting before turning to photography in graduate school.
As he got more involved in film, videography seemed like the natural progression. Since he needed figures in motion, he turned to dancers. He’s grown to love filming contemporary and modern dancers.
“I thought it might be a temporary thing, but it turned out to be a really great experience for me and the dancers,” said MacHose, who has worked at Lafayette since 2012. “They seem to really love the process. It’s about them making their art as well, it’s not just about me.”