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.

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.  

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.