This semester, being forced to transition courses to distance learning, I’ve struggled with how to create an environment of creative and applied learning experiences rather than just learning activities that focus on the more basic skills of remembering and understanding of course content.  Typically in my face to face courses a significant amount of time is spent in applied learning activities many of which include role playing, simulations, and student lead demonstrations, etc. Some of the challenge (aside from teaching during a pandemic and all that entails!) is my limited knowledge and use of LMS systems other than as a repository for grading assignments, student introductions, quizzes/tests, and some limited group interactions/projects usually in dyads.  However I do feel that experiential learning experiences are challenging to construct in an online platform even in the best of times.

This semester is also the first time that I’ve dipped my toes in the waters of O.E.R. and Open Pedagogy as well.  My initial understanding of O.E.R. was simply that it was a way of saving students some money, which is fantastic in itself of course, but I had not really recognized its potential impact through the perspective lenses of accessibility and all its implications.  I knew even less about Open Pedagogy when my Chair suggested that I involve myself in this initiative this semester.  My cursory understanding was that it had “something to do” with students co-creating course content which given many of the courses I teach which articulate with upper level programs in other colleges my initial reaction was “ ok but how is that going to work?”

As the semester has unfolded and there has been a bit of time to delve deeper my vision and appreciation of both O.E.R. and Open Pedagogy has been expanding along with my enthusiasm. I am beginning to glimpse that co-created learning activities might help to address my initial frustration with how to move from wrote memory learning to more creative applied experiential activities even if we must continue with distance learning.

Travis Thurston, Assistant Director of Empowering Teaching Excellence at University of Utah, has addressed the concept of creating an “architecture of engagement” within L.M.S. environments by moving past the traditional use of discussion board posts/comments to more constructed exchanges with playful or game based prompts to encourage participation along with incentives for extra credit (tricky) built in. He has structured on line conversations incorporating Blooms Taxonomy to cue the students on the type and depth of posts and responses to topic areas being explored. Students do have the flexibility both at the beginning of the course and throughout to direct the flow of conceptual exploration.

I still am thrashing about a bit with how to manage the involvement and participation of student groups in an online environment. I eliminated those activities this semester because I was unsure if students would be able to consistently engage in intra-group interactions and projects as I’ve found that challenging in the past even in the best of times. Often the connection between students that is formed in the face to face classroom does help with supporting their engagement together in on line Blackboard activities. I look to the “collective wisdom” for supportive ideas in this aspect of constructing student initiated group projects and online activities to maximize their participation.

Thurston, T, “Online Engagement Through Digital Powerups”, (Audio podcast) Episode 295, Teaching in Higher Education, February 2, 2020

Online Engagement Through Digital PowerUps

I apologize for not posting this sooner, as I know you will not have time to read for today, but I will once again plug the work of Maura A. Smale and Mariana Regalado who co-authored Digital Technology as Affordance and Barrier in Higher Education. They are both CUNY professors and their work documents the challenges of open education when students do/do not have access to technology. As I wrote about in my earlier post, this seems to be especially relevant for this moment. While I first read it about a year ago, I think I need to give it another read this summer, especially if we are looking at some form of distance-learning for the fall 2020 semester. I have a PDF of the text if anyone would like me to share it with them, or if we want to post to the course site.

In terms of SDGs, piloting my course and possible assignments, I plan on piloting this work in THA 50: Introduction to Theatre. It is the course in which I first began my work with open pedagogy and I believe it is time to revisit/rethink that work. The SDGs that I am considering are Goal #5: Gender Equality and Goal #10: Reduced Inequalities. Preliminarily, I have two possible assignments that I am considering. The first is less of an assignment and more of a theme for the course, in that all of the plays that we would read and analyze in the course would somehow intersect, illuminate, grapple with the selected SDGs. Plays/Genres that come to mind include School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh, Eclipsed by Danai Gurira, the work of Augusto Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed (Brazil), Is This a Room by Tina Satter, and Sactuary City by Martyna Majok. The second assignment is a “Rewriting His(hers)tory” assignment where students select women artists from theatre history, conduct research and then explore the Wikipedia pages of these artists for gaps in the information. Students will then submit edits to expand the Wikipedia entries with cited secondary literature.

When I initially applied to be an OER fellow and this pandemic was not such a presence in our lives, I thought I would explore these SDGs through THA 53: Acting II/Scene Study (which I definitely could still do). But I am doing several “open” projects right now, all of which are touching upon my work in THA 50 so it seems like the logical choice. I look forward to seeing how these preliminary ideas expand and morph as our conversations continue.

Backward Design – Urban Sociology                    Fall 2020

1. Where do you want to go?

1. Urban Sociology Objectives
   1. Understand and distinguish between myths and realities regarding city life and other human settlements. 
   1. Understand the importance of politics and the economy in structuring cities. 
   1. Identify the impact of globalization on emergence and development of cities.
   1. Identify other forces (immigration, e.g.) impacting cities. 
   1. Identify, locate and use appropriate sources of information for academic work. 
   1. Identify and understand community activism in urban settings. 
   1. General Sociological Understandings
      1. Social Construction of Reality
      1. System model of society
      1. Power as a relational distribution of resources, including attention.
      1. Collective Action
      1. Narrative organization of our perceptions
      1. Method for construction of new knowledge
   1. Skills
      1. Improve their writing in terms of its attention to audience, argument and validity of its sources.
      1. Be able to describe and draw conclusions from graphs, and pivot tables.
      1. Be able to independently gather publicly available, outside sources of information for use in their own research.
   1. Conceptual Fluency
      1. Seeing Mental Models – understanding thinking
      1. Coordinating Classes
      1. Application of Conceptual Models – RPD, Iceberg Model, Trust Equation
   1. Participating in an academic/professional register
      1. Presentations for both an academic and lay audience – oral, textual and other media.

• How will we know when we have arrived?

1. Students will be able to write a 3 – 5 page analytic essay that uses the concepts of the course to explain a feature, domain, or circumstance in the world of their own choosing.
   1. Students will be able to produce a blog, website, PSA or other artefact that can be posted to the public domain that makes use of one or more concepts from the course in its analysis/message.
   1. Students will engage in a project that includes data collection, data organization and analysis. This may include, interviews, surveys and statistical data.

• What do we need to get us there?

Framing Question for the course: What might local and global responses to Climate Change

look like in Cities? Or, Are we all going to have to learn to live under water?

1. Models
   1. Role Power Diagram
   1. Iceberg Model of society
   1. Trust Equation
   1. Experiences of different systems  (in Hybrid format only)
      1. Cold War/Bombing Game
      1. Market system
      1. Village system
      1. Tribal, hunter-gatherer system
   1. History
      1. James Scott – Against the Grain
      1. The origin of cities and the evolution of complex human economic/social/political systems.
   1. Presentations
      1. Evolution of Slavery
      1.   
      1.   
   1. Minor Assignments – formative assessments
      1. Extended writing assignments every two weeks on Turnitin.
      1. Weekly homework assignments to Blackboard – bulk feedback to all through the Week in Review.
   1. Major Assignments
      1. Weekly Homework – 15%
      1. Midterm Exam – (long answer and essay)  15%
      1. Final Exam – (long answer and essay)    15%
      1. Final Project – essay, video, presentation – outside audience 30%
      1. Writing Portfolio – assessment of individual growth 25%

Organizing Theme/Project for the course:

UN Sustainability Goal 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/cities/

The four elements of the goal above (inclusiveness, safety, resilience and sustainability) will be explored by students over the course of the semester, which will be divided into three phases.

1.      Introduction. Origin and Relationships.

2.      Data Collection and Relationships.

3.      Analysis, Communication and Relationships.

Cities are not things. They are not buildings, roads, pipes or monuments. They are cultural, political and economic relationships between groups embodied in particular places at particular times.

Phase One:   Origins, History & Current Challenges

            Through an examination of the text, Against the Grain, by James Scott (freely available to students on Perusall.com) students will develop an understanding of the emergence of cities and the dynamics that have made them the dominant for of settlement over the past 7,000 years.

            This will be followed by a focus on the growing urbanization of the planet and the growing impacts of climate change on that process.

Phase Two:   Mapping Project

            Through the use of Arc GIS, students will explore, individually and in groups, spatially-based data in the pursuit of both teacher-generated and student-generated questions around the general topic of Climate Change and the building of resilience.

Phase Three:  Culminating Project with Audience

            During the final month of the course, students will focus on Brooklyn and/or New York City and the issue of resilience. They will identify the top three expected impacts from Climate Change and using Arc GIS they will identify which parts of the city and the communities that live there will be most impacted. They will then develop/explore different potential strategies for increasing the resilience of those areas and develop an intervention to either the general public or a targeted group of decision-makers to share their ideas.

So, I have been thinking about this idea for a while, and have really appreciated situating it within the OP/SDG framework. It is not entirely formulated but the idea is to create a classroom research project based on the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the 1930s, which has been the focus of my own research. By way of context, the FWP hired some 6,000 Americans during the Depression to document the country. The idea was to generate a portrait of national identity that would celebrate diversity and engage people from all backgrounds in the cultures and folklore of their own country.

My project would align with the “reduced inequalities” SDG, in its goal to “promote social cohesion between groups of diverse natures.” It would essentially be a contemporary and localized version of the FWP, that would invite students to document and investigate KCC’s community in the same spirit as the 1930s fieldworkers. Within the context of my English composition courses, I would charge students with collecting and transcribing oral histories and folklore (broadly defined as cultural practices), and writing ethnographic essays and profiles based on students and faculty—within a series of guided “topics,” that themselves also align with various SDGs.  

But the key sustainable OP aspect of this is that the class would use digital tools to collect, catalogue and disseminate the archive and they’d showcase their work on a website that could continue to be populated by future students in new composition courses. This would not be a one-off course project, but a longer-term repository for living history, not to mention a useful curriculum for the composition program. Students would be developing and expanding the skills fundamental to these courses– textual analysis, critical writing, and research methods—in a format that I believe could be really accessible and empowering, that connects them to one another, and that has a life and purpose beyond the immediate classroom.

The result ideally would be a complex portrait of collective identity, which certainly in this crazy moment, seems to take on an urgency akin to that felt during the Depression. I’ve done a lot of oral history collecting in the classroom, and it always generates fascinating discussions, questions, and stronger bonds between students from very different backgrounds. But both the FWP and the SDGs offer these efforts historical shape and purpose that I believe would make them more focused and meaningful.

That’s it. There’s more to say but I’ll stop — I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

–Sara Rutkowski

Stuart ParkerApril 13, 2020 at 3:55 pm

I will try to ignore the fact that Jason’s original post was written on April 1st.
I was re-reading the readings this weekend trying to get a better handle on how this initiative that my peripheral gaze had told me was just a technical maneuver to use new technology to break, or at least weaken, the grip of the publishing industry on its monopoly rents and inordinate influence over what it taught in classrooms, could become the latest new curricular innovation. As I tried to make sense of this the following analogy occurred to me. It seems moderately helpful to me, but I welcome feedback to see how close a fit it is.
Imagine a skier getting ready to go down a difficult ski slope. The folks in the ski shop hand her a trench coat along with her rented skis and she slowly makes her way up to the ski lift. Coming down, the heavy trench coat weighs her down, is very difficult for her to maneuver and she fall frequently. When she gets down to the bottom of the slope she goes back to the ski shop and complains to the staff. They take back the trench coat and hand her a light jacket. She heads back to the lift feeling a little chill.
This second time, she comes down the hill fast because she is cold. She takes some short cuts, missing a several nice moguls and hangs out by the fireplace at the bottom for several minutes before going back to the shop.
Finally when she goes back to the shop the attendant feels sorry for her and hands her a ski parka. She spends the rest of the day happily skiing down the slope.
This is what the first phase of OER seems to me. The trench coat was the cost heavy textbook that weighed students down. The light jacket was the resulting strategy many students took of just doing without the textbook altogether and the parka was supposed to be the right fit where we can go back to the world as it was with students doing their damn homework (finally) with no excuses.
Phase two seems to me to be very much a work in progress. “Open” as a founding metaphor of a movement is more vacuous that anything I have seen in the last 40 years (yes, I have been around), but that is not necessarily a criticism. It seems to be linked to open codes and the promise of democracy, self-determination and transparency. Much of which Dewey was talking about as he was working on his typewriter.
The task I think we face today is that we need to rethink the ski’s we are on and whether we are even on the right slope which is going to hopefully involve more than just having students write new Wikipedia pages.