I have benefited from participation in professional development activities through the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) focused on developing course work and scholarship about civic learning and democratic engagement. One question that has been posed in the last few years has been: how can the promises of the humanities, as traditionally understood, be integrated into departments with an update that appreciates differences, rights, agency, and social change? 

This question has been on my mind as we begin this adventure into transforming our curriculum at Kingsborough Community College through Open Pedagogical Strategies. For my part, I am transforming a course that is required within the Justice Academy but is also a course that draws in students from Nursing, Liberal Arts, Computer Science, Engineering, Biology and many students who are not sure what they want to major in. Pol 67, American Legal System, is very broad and can be taught from many points of view. I wondered how I could position the Courts as a venue for Social Change. 

Within my scholarly commitments and interest, I adhere to a methodology from scholars who deviated from traditional political science studies, traditional legal studies, and traditional history studies and began the Law and Society movement in the late 1950’s. 

I began examining Universal Human Rights and International Courts in 2003 around the global issues of climate change and migration (Goals 13 and 16). For this project I am hoping to integrate this research into the classroom and position the class as a kind of clinic where students can research the United States Sustainability Goals of their choice and learn how to conduct legal research as one possible strategy for social change. One of the suggested learning outcomes as a Justice Academy program in our department is:  Demonstrate the ability to access, conduct, interpret, and apply justice research. 

During this semester I am experimenting with students with how best to break down a research and writing project. In some ways COVID has made this process a bit easier in that I needed a platform to collect student drafts, inquiries, writing practicums, and to provide digital teaching resources to respond to student questions. I am using CUNY Commons, Google Forms and Docs, and Youtube in addition to email, Blackboard Collaborate and Zoom. One OER I am interested in developing for the next semester is the Zine. 

One such Zine is from Barnard College: Lesson C: How do systems of power repress voices of dissent? One thing I like about this assignment is that it positions protest, the resistance to domination, as a valid form of political participation. On the other hand, sometimes students fall into a state of hopelessness when their content does not make immediate change. I think the historical context of this assignment could be better structured and very likely it will need to be surrounded by other assignments. In sum, it is reassuring that the burden of assignment design is eased by access to a larger community of work in OER that focuses on a non-elitist point of view about politics and power. 

For our next round of materials to read and discuss, I decided that we should all find something we want to discuss, and blog about it, then we can read each others’ posts as well as whatever the post was about it to prepare for a participant-led discussion at our next meeting.  Was this me trying to incorporate open pedagogy into the functioning of our group, or was it me too stressed out to find new readings?  It’s actually the first reason, though the second reason is one of the benefits of opening up this group, and my classes.  The more I can open up, let go, and get participants or students to do, the better for them, and the better for the group (whether it be our group of fellows or a class).  This doesn’t come naturally to me, so the more I practice, the better I hope to get at retraining my instincts away from control and towards open.  

 I’ve been doing some reading and thinking about how to open my American Government assignments, and I found this blog post from Nate Angell about an Open Bingo Card, and various aspects of open and opening to be quite useful as a practical list of questions to ask about different parts of assignments and my course.  I recommend clicking back through the previous iterations and blog posts that are linked to Nate’s post, so you can see how the bingo card evolved from a rubric (that post is here if you get lost: http://xolotl.org/okp-learning-experience-rubric/​)- this is itself an example of the benefits of learning in the open- the bingo card evolved through input on the rubric, and was made better because of being open to input and comment.  I sometimes struggle with open pedagogy, because there isn’t a very clear simple definition, because without that simple clear definition, I can’t answer whether my attempt is open or not.  And I think that Nate’s original rubric starts from the point of trying to respond to that need- if folks want to open up their teaching, how do they know if they’ve done it?  By grading it against a rubric.  But his evolution to a bingo card, with every square itself multi-faceted, tells us a lot about open pedagogy in a very meta way- it’s not something you should grade with a rubric- the point is not whether it is or it isn’t, the point is the process of thinking through how it could be, in as many different ways as possible.  He even left a few blank squares and one blank facet on each square, because there could always be more ways to think about open.  

I know I am a little late with this post but I did want to document some of my thoughts/questions in response to the recent readings. As educators and students work to navigate this current moment, I have been thinking a lot about what “open” means, as well as the benefits and challenges of engaging in open educational practices while also converting classes to online formats.

My experience with open educational practices (large umbrella term) is both varied and honestly, inconsistent. In the Spring of 2017, I worked with Shawna to adopt an existing open textbook (out of the University of Florida) for our 10-15 sections of THA 50: Introduction to Theatre course. We supplemented the existing open textbook with e-scripts of plays from the Kingsborough library that all KCC students would, theoretically, have access to. The existing text, entitled Theatrical Worlds, is not perfect and it is missing units/chapters on topics that are in our THA 50 curriculum. That said, faculty have reported that student engagement with the course text and the dramatic scripts has increased. While this is an improvement, we still have work to do to create an OER that is more robust and truly reflective of our curriculum.

While I am weaving through the obstacle course of “open” as an educator, I am also at a time when I am navigating it as a student. After completing my MFA in Musical Theatre in 2004 and my MA in Theatre Studies in 2017, I returned to graduate study in the fall of 2018 to pursue my PhD in Theatre & Performance at The Graduate Center. I am completing my coursework this semester, online, having never taken an online class in my life. My own struggles and questions with online learning as a student remind me of those that my students might be experiencing. Further, as part of my doctoral studies, I am completing a certificate in Interactive Technology & Pedagogy which has pushed me to question the concept of open, of access, and of the role of technology in education. The work of Maura A. Smale and Mariana Regalado who co-authored Digital Technology as Affordance and Barrier in Higher Education, documents the varying degrees of access to technology across CUNY. While I am privileged to have access to technology, Smale and Regalado remind me that as I work to create openness in my teaching, an over-reliance on technology might marginalize the students I strive to bring into the conversation.

AS a non-traditional educator I find myself constantly engaged in a dual process of seeking out team-members who admit they experienced a form of isolation in graduate school not too different from the social isolation during Corona 2020, and a barrage of terms that seem to change with the seasons in silos of disciplinary domains. Before I graduated from community college and then the public University, I was the first in my family to graduate with a degree, I worked in political campaigns and for a not-for-profit focused on civics and human rights education for high school kids. That experience guided me through law school where I worked on the pragmatic implementation of human rights from the ground up instead of the lofty ideals of chambers at the United Nations. I had experienced the constant need to work across differences, backgrounds, and opinions, unlike many of my colleagues in academia. Through this project, with a team of faculty members across differences, I intend to further my work to bridge the gap between law as ideal (among elites) and the reality of law for ordinary folk. Like others, I am convinced that a practical use of rights consciousness and social change comes through education.  

In a published article from 2018, I responded to a claim by Andy Lane (2016) that the “rhetoric” about “open education” and pedagogical practices was “ahead of the reality.” While I agreed with Lane that emancipation in the learning process requires a more political stance by educators, I argued that for social change to occur (beyond platitudes and citations to Freire) in the classroom, “technology must be integrated into course work in the humanities so that students can engage with social, political, and legal institutions and behavior.” I ground this epistemological claim in the work done by political scientists who push beyond a pluralist model of politics. Lukes (2005) and McCann (2020) have long articulated the work done by Foucault and feminist scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins for a view of power and social change that includes not only the dominant position, but also the resistance strategies and the social construction of reality evident since the turn toward empirical science 100 years ago (2019). 

In my work, I have tried to work with others to study collective action problems in the shadow of work done by Ostrom, Hardin, Bateson, Lator, Levi, and many others. While the successes have been modest and the failures persistent (2016), I am encouraged by the turn towards equity among institutions, faculty, and students.  As social science theorists know well, our attempts to construct a shared language around open pedagogy, equity, and social change will largely influence what successes we are able to implement in reality. I am optimistic about this work and hope others join us as we try to think of ways to integrate urgent modern problems into the curriculum at our community college in one of the most diverse areas in the world.