To be completed by Wednesday, June 5.
Watch the video below, in which Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani introduce the idea of open pedagogy. The video is about one hour in length. The first three minutes are an introduction to the webinar series, so the video is cued to start at 3:12 to skip that part.
Drawing on the “What Is Open Pedagogy” article and this talk by DeRosa and Jhangiani, respond to the following in the comments section below:
- What interests or excites you about open pedagogy? What, if anything, do you find confusing or challenging?
- How would you describe open pedagogy to a colleague who has never heard of it?
- What makes an assignment open pedagogy?
10 thoughts on “What is open pedagogy?”
This was am energizing video. It got me thinking about what I do and what I could be doing.
What Is open pedagogy — it is an opportunity to have students interact or present to a larger community. As a performing artists, this appeals to me. My instrumental students, at their best, are giving their art to an audience — they are expressing themselves, but truthfully the larger goal is for the audience to have an experience. Open Pedagogy brings a level of that presentation to a standard lecture class. It also creates the idea of something lasting, not just a disposable assignment they will forget when the semester is over.
What I do now? Not that much — OER textbook. No costs offers for concerts and all media.
What I have haven’t done — revise the text, which has lots of dead links and thus useless listening guides. That could be a great assignment for a Music 102. I need to understand better then mechanics of how to do that.
I am also thinking of an assignment where the students help create an anthology of listening from across Western Music. There are all sorts of copyright and media challenges to completing this.
Additionally, I am thinking of creating a open assignment for my summer, non-BMCC class of adults. They are almost all retirees, and many are educators. They are all people who are studying music at various levels. Few methodologies exist for adult instrumental learners and I am thinking we might be able to start to create something with all their input.
Hello, Ina!
There are some places to find public domain and/or openly licensed recordings of classical music. See the Free Music Library. Much of the music there is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so you can use it only as is, not as (for example) part of the soundtrack in a film or podcast. Probably fine in an anthology! The International Music Score Library Project is MASSIVE and includes CC-licensed/public domain recordings as well as scores. Note that the navigation at this site isn’t great, and public domain in Canada (where this project is based) is not the same as in the United States. I’d be glad to help you with either or both of these resources as needed, both now and later, when you’re actually teaching your course.
Thanks Rachel. I am very familiar with IMSLP, though more for written scores then recording.
I will need to do some more thinking about how to work this and what it could look like.
• What interests or excites you about open pedagogy? What, if anything, do you find confusing or challenging?
Open pedagogy enables students to voice their interests, challenges, and strengths since students can explain what they want to learn and eliminate “the middle agent” -the traditional textbooks. This is a learner-centered pedagogy and reflects students’ interests. Students and the professor can collect open resources that students do not need to pay for free access. Students can exhibit their skills and use their services in the community (experiential learning) to create a hands-on learning experience that remains with them all the time. I believe this is very meaningful.
Does open pedagogy change from group to group? In other words, with each student group, do OER materials change according to their interests?
• How would you describe open pedagogy to a colleague who has never heard of it?
Open pedagogy is a unique way to include students in their education and have them establish themselves in what they want to learn, select topics and materials to share, and create a learning environment in which everyone thrives, providing equal access and opportunity for education. Students can collaborate and learn from each other; in other words, the learning process they go through helps them to use their skills in the community which is part of experiential learning.
• What makes an assignment open pedagogy?
According to the Open Pedagogy Notebook, the website article, assignments should include characteristics of learning, teaching, technology, and social justice. For example, editing Wikipedia articles, rewriting the course content using students’ perspectives, or students can use Twitter or open plants to engage in scholarly discussion with experts, or apply the skills they’ve learned in classes to serve the community. They can help to provide answers to social problems.
I feel excited the way open pedagogy requires collaboration on the part of instructors and learners, and asks instructors to respond to needs of those learners. I’m especially curious about working with students to create syllabi and curate materials that speak to their interests. I can see how asking that of a student or learner is an offering of respect through responsibility. “I care what you care about…” And I can see how this might help students commit more of themselves to their learning.
I myself am resistant to technology, so I find editing Wikipedia, for instance, or using technology to collaborate with students intimidating. I can get past this, of course, but since its just one arm of OER, there’s likely space for others like me.
If I were describing open pedagogy to a colleague, good luck to them! But I suppose I’d say that open pedagogy attempts to make knowledge accessible and free of cost to students, and that it centers the student and their interests, asking the student or learner to collaborate with their instructor on their education. And I’d say it prioritizes assignments that aren’t disposable so that the work students generate can exist in relationship to the outside world, should they want that.
An open pedagogy assignment is, to me, one that will continue to be alive outside the classroom.
Love that last line! And yes, there is space for no or less tech in open pedagogy. For no tech, we love zines! and for low tech, public writing on the OpenLab can be designed so students submit their work through a form, which is how Rachael works with student book reviewers on BMCC Reads.
Really great to see some examples of open pedagogy in the video. I especially liked the English lit online “textbook” that Prof. Robin Derosa created with her students.
What interests or excites you about open pedagogy?
The idea that students can be so hands-on in knowledge creation is pretty eye-opening and exciting. It seems like a potentially great way to engage students from the get-go. From learning more about open pedagogy thru the article and video, I’m interested in finding ways of involving students in the learning process in a more active way. Engagement can be tough with some students, and the video (and the article to some extent) got me wondering about how to harness the power of this kind of approach.
For example, when one of the profs spoke about losing access to online tools or the work that was created in those tools, it made me think I could tweak my current use of the screenwriting software students use for the fiction part of the course; it might make sense to get them more working with it during the nonfiction part of the course, something I’ve thought about before but have not been able to work in yet and being able to post and share with each other at least in that software and possibly beyond for students who would opt to do so. So brainstorming on that front.
Another piece of the open pedagogy approach that might benefit my script-writing class is the collaborative piece. While writing their scripts is a solo effort, there may be room for incorporating more peer review into the class time. Not really open pedagogy, tho.
But more generally, the article and video have made me consider more ways to open up the learning process in new ways.
What, if anything, do you find confusing or challenging?
I don’t think I find any of the concepts confusing. But the challenge is to figure out where to loop in open pedagogy into a course that is pretty regimented in the work that students must complete. There’s definitely room, but the question is where and how much?
How would you describe open pedagogy to a colleague who has never heard of it?
Building on the idea of knowledge being a human right and thus something that should be accessible to all, open pedagogy celebrates the combined creativity of the teacher/coach and his/her learners by finding ways to incorporate the students more directly in the knowledge creation part of teaching. More specifically, it involves teaching approaches and learning modes that allow for the five R’s — to retain, reuse, remix, revise, and redistribute educational materials.
What makes an assignment open pedagogy?
Assignments that are learner-driven, meaning that students are contribute to their creation and as such are agents of their own learning.
This whole assignment has me rethinking possibilities with the documentary script project as well as the fiction script. For example, possibly finding ways for students to collaborate on finding elements from the articles they’re basing the script on and posting these somewhere so other students can see the types of audio and video assets needed for a successful project. That assignment is key to the project, and inevitably some students totally get what is needed and others are lost. But making this into a public assignment could help the students not getting it what they should be looking for and listing.
This is a first draft, largely stream-of-consciousness reflection on the questions, so apologies for typos and the randomness of what struck me upon completing this part of the (long) assignment.
What interests or excites you about open pedagogy? What, if anything, do you find confusing or challenging?
Part of what I enjoy about using open pedagogy in my classes is that I enjoy curating my own content for classes as well as developing and finding my own materials, as opposed to relying on a textbook with preselected texts and learning materials. Our culture is always shifting and changing, and even as a young student I can remember feeling that the materials within these text books felt so dated and so out of touch. By using open pedagogy materials, my class is more reflective of the needs and moment that my students are in. As someone who sometimes found textbooks to be a financial burden in college and grad school (or who had to go without an AP History textbook in high school because there just weren’t enough), I am happy to provide my students with materials that do cost them additional money and for which they do not have to spend time tracking down on their own. Even when I did require physical books for my classes, there were always students who never purchased the book for whom I would either have to gift a copy or supply with photocopies. I also really like the idea of students being able to connect with and teach future students through the fruits of their assignments. By using these types of assignments they can have a greater purpose and life beyond that class instead of just seeing being as “disposable” things that only you and the students ever see. Two small things I still find somewhat confusing and challenging (even though I have been partaking in OER related programs for awhile now) are the ideal places to find OER materials as well as the ideal places to share newly created ones.
How would you describe open pedagogy to a colleague who has never heard of it?
I would describe it as being a more democratic, student centered approach to pedagogy that lets go of some of the problematic barriers and beliefs in academia. I would also say that it allows students to become the creators of knowledge as opposed to simply being the depositories for knowledge.
What makes an assignment open pedagogy?
An open pedagogy assignment is one that has student create content that has a greater purpose beyond the classroom and can be used to impart information to others. The assignment no longer is disposable and no longer just for the eyes of the professor/instructor. These assignments are more student driven and give them greater agency over their education and their work.
What interests or excites you about open pedagogy?
I am interested in thinking about learners as transformers and as agents of their learning
as well as all aspects of the 3 R’s:
Retain
Revise
Reuse
Remix
Redistribute
Every aspect of the Art History canon has been challenged and is in flux at this moment. Open Pedagogy is such a great way to act on this in the classroom as a core way to contribute to transforming static content into a field in motion (quoted from the video). The field needs the diverse voices to contribute to understanding and knowledge of past and contemporary work.
How would you describe open pedagogy to a colleague who has never heard of it?
Open pedagogy is learner-driven. It is a framework to create experiential learning scholarship assignments and activities. It is process and product based, and also collaborative. A key aspect of open pedagogy is that knowledge is a human right and should be accessible to all.
What makes an assignment open pedagogy?
An open pedagogy assignment would be “published”, that is to say, public. The assignment could take a variety of forms, such as researched entries in a digital text book, a review, or Wikipedia entry, and would be distributed in an open-free digital platform. Connecting to a community and sharing knowledge is also a goal of an open pedagogy assignment.
The teacher and learner contributes and receives.
Open pedagogy is an educational approach that excites me because it prioritizes student agency, academic freedom, and a student-centered learning environment. What interests me the most is the idea that open pedagogy allows students to actively participate in the creation of knowledge and engage with diverse materials that promote social justice and cultural inclusivity. It encourages the use of technology and open educational resources instead of traditional textbooks, which can be cost-effective and accessible to all students. However, one of the challenging aspects of open pedagogy is the need to find alternative resources and materials to replace textbooks. To explain this approach to colleagues who are unfamiliar with it, I would describe it as an opportunity to design assignments in literature that encourage students to explore and create their own content, engage with technology, and critically analyze diverse literary works. It is an empowering approach that fosters student ownership of their learning and encourages the integration of social justice and cultural diversity in the curriculum.