Teaching Philosophy
Tim Maxwell's Story
When I was a child my son's age, six, I would come to Foothill College every
now and then with my late father, Dick Maxwell, who was one of the
first teachers to be hired there after the campus was built in the
early 60s. He brought me here to swim in the small faculty pool, which
has since been filled in. I guess I was learning more than how to
do the backstroke, because, twenty-five years later, I was teaching
English in the same rooms where he taught. Now, a decade
later, I still teach at Foothill as well as several other colleges on the Peninsula.
I went to
Palo Alto High School, attended Foothill for two quarters as a
student, wandered through some of most distant and enlightening and
difficult places in the world, learned French and stonemasonry, majored
in English, camped with Tibetan nomads, received my B.A from U.C.
Berkeley, traveled some more, taught English for a year in Tokyo, sold
spiritual and religious books for Harper-Collins, saw the aftermath of
the Romanian revolution, learned to speak Spanish, taught K-12 as a sub
in Cupertino and then in San Francisco, began writing poetry, earned an
MA in English from UC Berkeley, wrote poetry for two more years
while getting an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon,
married a writer, moved to San Francisco again, (started at Foothill),
later taught at De Anza, had a son, Isham, coordinated De Anza's Honors
Program, and taught writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. I am pleased to be teaching at the College of San Mateo and at Canada this term.
I currently live near the ocean in San Francisco with Isham and our dog,
named Mars Rover.
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Maxwell
and son at the bull fights in San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico.
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Academic
Propaganda
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TIM MAXWELL'S TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
In all of the subjects I teach or have taught
--
literature, fiction, poetry, ESL, basic skills, and especially
composition -- I see it as my mission to deliver not only the content
of the course but also to help my students develop a "border
consciousness." I strive to prepare them for the life-long
process of learning by teaching them that their world is evolving and
that their voices can participate in its evolution.
In my teaching, I endeavor to create learning
environments in which all of my students can feel safe to test their
borders, to abandon the comforting notion that truth is stable, and to
begin asking questions they never dared to ask before.
Practically, my purpose is to help them find and articulate their own
answers to their own questions, answers that are true both to them and
to their intended audience. I hope to help my students see that,
since our relationship to our world is inherently complex, we must
learn to resist our instincts to either reject difficult questions or
to accept simplistic answers.
I see it as my responsibility as a
teacher to guide my students toward acquiring the attitude, the tools,
and the ethics that will serve them as they make difficult journeys
within or across the complex borders that divide various discourse
communities.
As a teacher, I know that students would not
discover their full potential as writers and thinkers if I fed them
pre-formed perspectives on issues, controversies, or questions; "giving
them what is good for them" does not provide students with ownership
over their thinking. Already the rhetoric of our culture and
society encourages dualistic thinking. This, in part, results in
students who enter our classes prepared to practice the defense or
attack of pre-established positions based on reasoning they often have
received uncritically from perceived authorities; or, they come to us
unprepared to raise questions at all, having never seen the point of
raising their hands.
As a teacher, I believe I can make a
difference. I encourage them to develop a voice and a critical
attitude, and to earn their conclusions through responsible research,
sound thinking, and sound writing. They learn to learn to strive
to clarify complex ideas for an audience across the border, and to thus
begin to transcend the ignorance the border often perpetuates.
Most recently, I have taught writing courses
on critical
thinking in wartime, the rhetoric of journalistic contemporary
communication, and the problems and possibilities of historical
understanding through a focus on the Holocaust in literature and film.
I believe that people can only learn to
become
powerful, effective, and versatile performers in their various
communities by learning how to negotiate the rhetorical triangle within
not just one but a multiplicity of different situations. In any
class I teach, I hope to facilitate the expansion of my students'
concept of audience and purpose, helping them to understand --
often for the first time -- how to tailor their responses to suit the
elements of the specific situation at hand. Each response,
they learn, must be shaped by certain rhetorical principles rather than
by rules of what to do and what not to do.
By providing them with
ample opportunity to experience different configurations of the class
through structured small-group work, peer review, and exercises
designed to remove the teacher authority from their interaction, I
instill at least part of the authority of the classroom both in my
individual students and in their mutual responsibility to one
another. I expand the walls of the classroom community by using
an on-line forum, in which students have the opportunity to have
written interaction. The community service writing component of
some of my courses has allowed for the combination of instruction and
the opportunity to do "real-world" writing; they are thus freed from
the confining structures of formulaic discourse and consequently are
better able to adjust their rhetoric to the expectations of various
academic and career situations. I can only wonder at the
potential of further integrating
web, visual rhetoric, and hypertext communication instruction into my
composition courses.
I have developed a pedagogy that helps my students
learn to make intelligent, ethical choices as writers rather than
relying on formulas and churning out bloodless exercises for teacher
evaluation; I teach them to learn. |
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