My three draft assignments are:
An infographic on an SDG target
An SDG-themed revision of my American Government What’s Your Problem Letter
A revised version of the final assignment for my linked POL-SOC class
I think I’m most happy with the infographic assignment, although that could well be because it’s brand new, and I haven’t seen its roadtest with actual students yet! I’ll work on revising them throughout the summer, before posting them to CUNY OER.
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.
It feels a bit strange to be writing about Open Pedagogy now, a week into CUNY’s (and most other colleges’ and universities’) pivot to emergency distance learning amid the global pandemic that is COVID-19. I admit that thinking about pedagogy, especially changing the way I teach, is not high on the list right now, when my mind is full of getting through the classes I have this semester, making sure I don’t lose any students, worrying about my health and my family, wondering about what is all going to happen, when diagnoses and fatalities mount daily and policies change by the hour. (I’m sure these concerns are shared by many, in this fellowship and beyond it). But the show must go on, if it can go on in a socially-distanced, work from home kind of way, which this fellowship can, so we will all do our best.
As I’ve been exploring Open Pedagogy for the past few semesters, I’m a bit ahead of the curve of the rest of the fellows in this cohort. I can say, that so far, having more student choice and agency in my classes has been an extraordinary improvement. Yes, there are some bumps- it so happens that my biggest experiment to date with incorporating student agency and choice just happens to be this semester, where everything has gone, at best, sideways because of the pandemic. I can say that because student choice, agency, and flexibility were already baked into my course design and syllabus, the adjustment to turning my courses into emergency-distance-learning was fairly easy- made blogging a mandatory adventure (so the requirement of weekly student work was met, and we could develop a bit of community by reading each others’ work), revised or removed all assignments that had required leaving the house, and I was done. I also reiterated that all assignments (except their exams) would be self-graded, and that all due dates are flexible given everything that was going on. In only a week so far, I’m happy to say the flexibility has worked well. I have to keep repeating it, and replying to emails with it, but it feels good to be able to tell students, especially now, don’t stay up late to finish my work- get a good night’s sleep for your health, and do a good job on the work when you have time. It’s so much better than previous semesters, which is really remarkable- given everything going on, for anything to be going as well as previously, let alone better, is magical. I’m going to savor that, while I read and comment on students blogs, and enjoy reading their memes (which I’ve always enjoyed in previous semesters, but now get to really enjoy, as I am mostly simply transfering their self-grade to the gradebook in Blackboard).
In all of this, I am definitely conflating, and possibly even conflagrating, OER, Open Pedagogy, the Pedagogy of Care, and Ungrading into one jumbled mess. I’ll use Catherine Cronin’s broader term to name my jumble “Open Educational Practices.” In extraordinary times, which these certainly are, all we can do is try to do the best we can, so that’s what I’ll keep trying to do.
