From Maxwell Perspective...

Team Approach

As the new Chapple Professor, Mark Rupert oversees the MAX Courses and helps champion the School’s team-taught approach to citizenship education.

Back in 1993, political scientist Mark Rupert was one of the faculty members who created the MAX Courses — the team-taught, cross-disciplinary Maxwell School courses that explore current public issues in the U.S. and around the world. Spearheaded by political science and public affairs professor Robert McClure, the MAX Courses aimed to enhance undergraduate education by giving first-year students the opportunity to learn about and debate critical issues in small group sessions, and articulate their positions in writing. Rupert, who began teaching at Maxwell in 1987, knew firsthand how important these courses were.

Mark Rupert, in Maxwell Auditorium — home base for the MAX Courses.

“The format was revolutionary, because at the time I came, teaching to 200-plus students in an auditorium, three lectures a week, was fairly common,” says Rupert. “One of the amazing things about the MAX Courses is that students spend two-thirds of their class time in small groups with a professor discussing issues, thinking out loud about them, and being more actively engaged than you can be in a big lecture session.” For both students and faculty, he says, “That was enormously appealing.”

In the two decades since the MAX curriculum was introduced, Rupert has taught almost continuously the MAX Courses Critical Issues in the United States and Global Community, as they have become a seminal Maxwell experience for thousands of students. Given that long history, Rupert was a natural choice to take the helm of the MAX Courses as the newly appointed Chapple Family Professor of Citizenship and Democracy. He becomes the third Chapple Professor, following McClure (now professor emeritus) and his political science colleague Kristi Andersen.

At Maxwell, Rupert teaches his own courses on international relations and political economy, and he does research on topics such as debates over globalization and, currently, populism in American politics. Rupert’s own scholarship does tie into some of the themes of the MAX Courses, but he is quick to say that these team-led, discussion-based courses are specifically designed so that the expertise of no individual professor — including the Chapple Professor — dominates the agenda. 

“Students spend two-thirds of their class time in small groups with a professor discussing issues, thinking out loud about them.”
— Chapple Professor Mark Rupert

“There’s a real sense in which all of us in the course, including faculty, are learners together,” he says. “None of us has a monopoly on the shape of the course.”

For students, too, one of the important lessons of the MAX Courses is that no one has a monopoly either on the answers to the complex issues they discuss — from education policy to economic inequality to immigration. The MAX Course professors help students not only to make their arguments as clearly and persuasively as possible, says Rupert, but also “to hear others and to appreciate that smart people with good intentions will answer questions differently than they do.”

To Rupert, this kind of open exchange of views and ideas is just as urgently needed now as it was when the courses were created. “Our society and our world face challenges on a whole range of fronts that are going to require collective action,” he says. “One of the missions of these courses is to help students think through issues in a way that they can then apply to other issues and carry over to address some of these bigger challenges.

“Now I’m not suggesting that the MAX Courses can save the world,” he adds. “But I am suggesting that if there were more courses like this in schools and colleges across the country, it wouldn’t hurt a bit.”

— Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

This article appeared in the summer 2015 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2015 Maxwell School of Syracuse University.