Open education has a goal – to make knowledge and opportunity available to all. Open educators are committed to addressing the many barriers that prevent everyone from getting a better education. Some of these barriers are financial, which impacts ability to access materials and resources. Many open educators have addressed these barriers through open education resources, Creative Commons or open platforms, such as MOOC’s. But there are other barriers that prevent education being available to all. These are internal to open educators themselves and might be harder to see.
ODeL attempts to articulate an alternative vision for rethinking how knowledge should be valued. While not separating itself from the system, the ODeL approach are intended to make education more sustainable, just, equitable and appropriate to specific contexts.
Wallis and Rocha suggest that, despite ODeL’s many good intentions to address educational injustices in the social world, our knowledge sharing efforts are also shaped by our own cognitive attitudes, structures and repertoires. When these blind spots are not recognized, especially by those who are responsible for navigating about this open world, then these educators become “epistemically arrogant, lazy and closed minded”.
Educators hold beliefs about the nature and limits of knowledge. Many are keen observers of change, constantly enquiring whether their class knows about something (propositional) and the extent of the ability to apply this knowingness (procedural knowledge). Open educators practices are inevitably shaped and supported by these implicit and explicit beliefs about propositional and procedural knowledge. Teachers put these beliefs about knowledge into action in their class via their pedagogy. Their beliefs about knowledge feel as if they are validated when they can see how their actions have aided their students to acquire that knowledge and to put it into practice. And this pattern is re-inforced
Open educators would like believe that knowledge can be transformative, and they often position themselves as forces for change. But not recognizing one’s own cognitive attitudes, structures and repertoires ( according to Wallis and Rocha) could also means that you are “epistemically spoiled”
Perhaps Tur et al has a kinder way of putting this. Those who are interested in open education are also in the process of attaining or crossing multiple conceptual thresholds. Crossing threshold is hard work. Especially to those who are attempting to pass through them. This effort requires such a significant shift, that the educator eventually achieves a different and deeper understanding of core disciplinary knowledge, even a new identity. Open practitioners are intentional. At some point, they have passed through some “threshold event” that has persuaded them to make explicit efforts to address the needs of the underserved or marginalized. But maybe there’s more than one threshold to navigated?
Openness is more than a package to be trained in. Rather, it’s a choice about how to become knowledgeable. The work of open educators seems informed, perhaps by a mindset and an identity. These are educators who seek to induct students into a subject and also offer them routes to participate in meaningful knowledge creation. For me, what appeals about ODeL is its deliberate intent to offer alternatives to hegemonic and cultural forces that shape a classroom. It seems as if this community recognize that we are all vulnerable to being ingested by a larger machine, that reproduces injustice, no matter what intent we bring into our digital classrooms.
Competent open educators respond to this tendency when they combine their designs and identify with others (a community). If open is to grow, then it will need to
- Constantly develop external capabilities and internal awareness among educators
- Understand how all systems and networks (open or not) might be be aligned and harnessed and see this as beneficial or harmful friction
- Discover the many pedagogical designs available to support student’s thoughts & schema.
I am very inspired by public efforts within the open education community. There, I see a momentum that is focused on developing suitable staff capabilities, internal awareness and friction systems. These practitioners seem to be harnessing digital and pedagogical resources to teach effectively both in remote and in-person settings. However, the “global north” remains the place where most of the open action is taking place. Puzzled that open initiatives are not focused elsewhere. How can open grow elsewhere? Mentorship, I think holds some of the answers.
More to come in a future post!
References
Tur G., Havemann L., Marsh D., Keefer J. M., & Nascimbeni F. (2020). Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework. Research in Learning Technology, 28. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2338
Wallis, P.D. & Rocha, T (2022) Designing for resistance: epistemic justice, learning design, and open educational practices. Journal for Multicultural Education, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JME-12-2021-0231