Above: Maxwell and son, Isham, in the redwoods.
| My 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 to the college to swim in the small faculty pool that 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, ten years later, I'm still in the neighborhood, here at the College of San Mateo. I have done other things along the way, of course. I attended 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, travelled 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, moved back to San Francisco, started at Foothill, and continued on to teach at De Anza, Diablo Valley College, USF, City College of San Francisco, College of Marin, Stanford University, Canada College, and College of San Mateo. I currently live with my son Isham and our dog Mars Rover out by Baker Beach. |
Below: Academic Propaganda
|
My 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. 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 strive to clarify complex ideas for audiences across the borders that limit them, and thereby to begin to transcend the ignorance these borders often perpetuate.
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. 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 audiences. 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 divisions between various discourse communities.
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 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; they are eager to assert opinions but are usually unprepared to make arguments. Or, they come to us unprepared to raise questions at all, having never seen the point of raising their hands.
In my composition classes, I assign readings for discussion and as models, addressing themes, such as communications, race or gender, in ways that are relevant to them in their lives. Typically, I use examples from diverse genres and from diverse perspectives to model the kinds of choices writers make and to reveal why they made them. One week, for instance, we might analyze the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and Martin Luther King's use of the arts of persuasion to transcend black-white polarity; and in the next week we might consider the less traditional rhetoric of contemporary writer Donnell Alexander, whose essay "Cool Like Me" explores the complexities of the relationship between black culture and white in his argument about the nature of "cool." I focus on the questions at issue between the authors and their audiences, and how they seek the assent of skeptical audiences by earning their conclusions.
Most recently, I have taught writing courses on propaganda, the rhetoric of journalistic contemporary communication, and the problems and possibilities of historical understanding through a focus on the Holocaust in literature and film. In my developmental classes, I emphasize a theme of “attention,” how to get it from others and how and when it is wise to pay it out—necessary life skills in the information age.
I have developed both pedagogy and practice that help 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.