This video, "Open Dialogues: How to Engage and Support Students in Open Pedagogy," by the University of British Columbia, outlines the approach which educators can take towards giving students an active voice in their work. Open pedagogy allows students to write for an audience, not just their professors, and encourages them to participate in digital projects, consider their work to be academically viable and contribute to the information environment. The video also mentions that open pedagogy allows students to be more aware of copyright and the Creative Commons as they examine open publishing and academic discussion.
I want students to think more about writing just for me as their professor, as the talking head in front of the room which I ultimately don't think is a very productive form of learning, whether in the humanities but specifically first Nation Studies more generally.
So getting students to conceive audience and move beyond that and to find their own tone of voice, and I think introducing digital projects and open practices into that is fundamental to making that happen.
Open Dialogues: a series on open education. How to engage and support students in open pedagogies.
Often the work that students have done academically is sort of treated as lesser than or is sometimes used as fodder for professor research projects or way to build up. So thinking about how to hold up student work as academic work and as viable contributions to this, in ways that isn't appropriative, I think is a real challenge not just at UBC, but for the academic world more broadly. Students for the most part don't understand their rights, so they don't understand copyright. And so that is a big part of class as well is that making clear what copyright is, what Creative Commons is, how they can state their rights.
Often they don't understand how they can label and mark their work through things like Creative Commons to establish those rights. So well I use open practices, and I use digital technologies, we do that through a window of copyright and Creative Commons so they can understand what the rights are around their words and the way that they get them out there.
When you publish, traditionally, anytime you publish, there's a feedback loop, whether it's peer review or whether it's just people disagreeing with your point of view. But I think open makes that much, much bigger and much more fraught and much more attack-y and negative in a lot of ways. So there's different stakes now with publishing, and openness widened that. All you need to understand how volatile these spaces are, you know, open up a National Post article, go the comments section there and see the racism, the misogyny, the hatred, and the vitriol that's spewed out of there.
So I think the callout culture is a big thing on Twitter and social media, is by pointing to people and saying like 'You are doing this wrong. How dare you?' Anger in there, but part of what I get my students to think about is this call in culture and how we can invite people into the conversation. So finding spaces where you can use calm, compassionate language to point out error, but not in a way that alienates people, but that brings them in and potentially looks at making them allies in this conversation.
Let's consider and define both concepts of open pedagogy:
Open refers to open educational resources (OER) – defined by UNESCO as “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license.”
Pedagogy is the practice and method of teaching; how we teach, rather than what we teach.
Open pedagogy is the use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional and individual level. When open pedagogy is used in the classroom, students are asked to part of the teaching process by participating in the co-creation of knowledge. For example, students can be engaged in open pedagogy by creating exercises for open textbooks or by incorporating student assignments into collections which can be used as future open textbooks.
For more information, examples and recommendations about open pedagogy, please check with the links below including BCcampus and the Open Pedagogy Network. Additionally, check out the benefits of open pedagogy at the end of this page.
From: BCcampus. (2020). What is open pedagogy? Retrieved from https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy/
The Pedagogy of the Open Society by Hegarty (2015) describes eight attributes or benefits of open pedagogy which facilitate students' voices, experiences, collaboration and learning in creating open educational resources. Many of these processes overlap:
From: Online Learning & Distance Education. (2019). Chapter 11.4 open pedagogy. Retrieved from https://www.tonybates.ca/2019/09/26/chapter-11-4-open-pedagogy/