Mara Fagin, teaching at MJC since 1988, focuses on her students’ need for as much active learning in the classroom as possible.  For example, during class, English 50 students typically will experience trips to the Modesto Farmers Market, the campus art gallery, the Great Valley Museum and the MJC farm.  Her hands-on assignments are based on real-life writing situations, such as the writing of opinion letters which students submit to the Modesto Bee, and the creation of oral histories of elders to share with the whole family. 

            She encourages her students to widen their experience of the world.  She herself often travels and teaches overseas when she’s not busy in the classrooms at MJC.  In the past five years, she has spent time in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, India, Japan, France and Spain.  She spent a year in Thailand in 1999-2000, teaching at a community college there, and in 2004 brought twenty MJC students back with her to study there.  In November 2005, she traveled to Anan-Cho, Japan, teaching for a week at a secondary school.

            Mara has always been interested in the value of diversity in the college and in the community. In fact, Mara's master’s degree project was to develop peer tutoring relationships between students at Humboldt State University and Native American students at the Hoopa Valley Reservation. Through that project and in the eighteen years since, she has seen how great things happen when people combine their different ways of being to form a new creation.

            Here are three typical in-class writing assignment you might be asked to complete if you became one of Mara’s students:

 English 50

 With a partner, go out of the classroom for the next fifteen minutes.  Find something that you haven’t noticed before on campus.  Sit down near it, and write a paragraph describing this something as completely as you can.  Return to the classroom, ready to read your paragraph to the class.

 English 101

 You’re going to spend five minutes finding the class member who is the most unlike you.  When the two of you have found each other, discuss what makes you so different for ten minutes.  Then, write few paragraphs detailing what you discovered in your conversation.  Make sure your draft has a thesis.

 English 103

 Go outside the classroom and walk around campus for the next fifteen minutes.  Mentally, categorize the people you see.  You pick the categories.   When you get back to the classroom, form triads.  Explain to each other how you categorized the people you saw.  Finally, write about what this process revealed to you about how you see people and how others may see people differently.