There are many ways to begin a discussion of “Open Pedagogy.” Although providing a framing definition might be the obvious place to start, we want to resist that for just a moment to ask a set of related questions: What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?

“Open Pedagogy”

Open pedagogy as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. But it is not a site vacant of meaning or political conviction. In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education.

History of the Term

“Open Pedagogy” as a named approach to teaching is nothing new. Scholars such as Catherine Cronin,^[1] Katy Jordan,^[2] Vivien Rolfe,^[3] and Tannis Morgan have traced the term back to early etymologies. Morgan cites a 1979 article^[4] by the Canadian Claude Paquette: “Paquette outlines three sets of foundational values of Open Pedagogy, namely: autonomy and interdependence; freedom and responsibility; democracy and participation.”

Many of us who work with Open Pedagogy today have come into the conversations not only through an interest in the historical arc of the scholarship of teaching and learning, but also by way of Open Education, and specifically, by way of Open Educational Resources (OERs). OERs are educational materials that are openly-licensed, usually with Creative Commons licenses, and therefore they are generally characterized by the 5 Rs^[5]: they can be reused, retained, redistributed, revised, and remixed. As conversations about teaching and learning developed around the experience of adopting and adapting OERs, the phrase “Open Pedagogy” began to re-emerge, this time crucially inflected with the same “open” that inflects the phrase “open license.”

Definitions

In this way, we can think about Open Pedagogy as a term that is connected to many teaching and learning theories that predate Open Education, but also as a term that is newly energized by its relationship to OERs and the broader ecosystem of open (Open Education, yes, but also Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, Open Source, Open Government, etc.). David Wiley, the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning,^[6] was one of the first OER-focused scholars who articulated how the use of OERs could transform pedagogy. He wrote in 2013 about the tragedy of “disposable assignments”^[7] that “actually suck value out of the world,” and he postulated not only that OERs offer a free alternative to high-priced commercial textbooks, but also that the open license would allow students (and teaching faculty) to contribute to the knowledge commons, not just consume from it, in meaningful and lasting ways. Recently, Wiley has revised his language to focus on “OER-Enabled Pedagogy,”^[8] with an explicit commitment to foregrounding the 5R permissions and the ways that they transform teaching and learning.

As Wiley has focused on students-as-contributors and the role of OERs in education, other Open Pedagogues have widened the lens through which Open Pedagogy refracts. Mike Caulfield, for example, has argued^[9] that while OER has been driving the car for a while, Open Pedagogy is in the backseat ready to hop over into the front. Caulfield sees the replacement of the proprietary textbook by OERs as a necessary step in enabling widespread institutional open learning practice. In that post, Caulfield shorthands Open Pedagogy: “student blogs, wikis, etc.” We might delve in a bit deeper here. Beyond participating in the creation of OERs via the 5 Rs, what exactly does it mean to engage in “Open Pedagogy?”

First, we want to recognize that Open Pedagogy shares common investments with many other historical and contemporary schools of pedagogy. For example, constructivist pedagogy, connected learning, and critical digital pedagogy are all recognizable pedagogical strands that overlap with Open Pedagogy. From constructivist pedagogy, particularly as it emerged from John Dewey and, in terms of its relationship to technology, from Seymour Papert, we recognize a critique of industrial and automated models for learning, a valuing of experiential and learner-centered inquiry, and a democratizing vision for the educational process. From connected learning, especially as it coheres in work supported by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub,^[10] we recognize a hope that human connections facilitated by technologies can help learners engage more fully with the knowledge and ideas that shape our world. And from critical digital pedagogy,^[11] as developed by Digital Humanities-influenced thinkers at Digital Pedagogy Lab out of educational philosophy espoused by scholars such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks, we recognize a commitment to diversity, collaboration, and structural critique of both educational systems and the technologies that permeate them.

Open Pedagogy & Human Rights

If we merge OER advocacy with the kinds of pedagogical approaches that focus on collaboration, connection, diversity, democracy, and critical assessments of educational tools and structures, we can begin to understand the breadth and power of Open Pedagogy as a guiding praxis. To do this, we need to link these pedagogical investments with the reality of the educational landscape as it now exists. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights^[12] asserts that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all.” Yet, even in North America in 2017, “the likelihood of earning a college degree is tied to family income” (Goldrick-Rab).^[13] For those of us who work in higher ed, it’s likely that we have been casually aware of the link between family income and college enrollment, attendance, persistence, and completion. But for those of us who teach, it’s also likely that the pedagogies and processes that inflect our daily work are several steps removed from the economic challenges that our students face. Even though 67% of college students in Florida and 54% of those in British Columbia^[14] cannot afford to purchase at least one of their required course textbooks, we more readily attribute their inability to complete assigned readings to laziness and entitlement than to unaffordability. This is precisely why the push to reduce the high cost of textbooks that has been the cornerstone of the OER movement has been a wake-up call for many of us who may not always have understood what we could do to directly impact the affordability of a college degree.

When faculty use OERs, we aren’t just saving a student money on textbooks: we are directly impacting that student’s ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course.^[15] In other words, we are directly impacting that student’s ability to attend, succeed in, and graduate from college. When we talk about OERs, we bring two things into focus: that access is critically important to conversations about academic success, and that faculty and other instructional staff can play a critical role in the process of making learning accessible.

If a central gift that OERs bring to students is that they make college more affordable, one of the central gifts that they bring to faculty is that of agency, and how this can help us rethink our pedagogies in ways that center on access. If we do this, we might start asking broader questions that go beyond “How can I lower the cost of textbooks in this course?” If we think of ourselves as responsible for making sure that everyone can come to our course table to learn, we will find ourselves concerned with the many other expenses that students face in paying for college. How will they get to class if they can’t afford gas money or a bus pass? How will they afford childcare on top of tuition fees? How will they focus on their homework if they haven’t had a square meal in two days or if they don’t know where they will be sleeping that night? How will their families pay rent if they cut back their work hours in order to attend classes? How much more student loan debt will they take on for each additional semester it takes to complete all of their required classes? How will they obtain the credit card they need to purchase an access code? How will they regularly access their free open textbook if they don’t own an expensive laptop or tablet?

A portion of this article was remixed from “Open Pedagogy and Social Justice” by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa, available under a CC-BY 4.0 license at http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/open-pedagogy-social-justice/.^[16]

Robin DeRosa is director of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University, part of the university system of New Hampshire. Her current research and advocacy work focuses on Open Education, and how universities can innovate in order to bring down costs for students, increase interdisciplinary collaboration, and refocus the academic world on strengthening the public good. She is also an editor for Hybrid Pedagogy, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that combines the strands of critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses for technology and new media in education. 

Rajiv Jhangiani is the University Teaching Fellow in Open Studies and a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He also serves as an Open Education Advisor with BCcampus and an associate editor of Psychology Learning and Teaching. Previously he served as an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group, a faculty fellow with the BC Open Textbook Project, a faculty workshop facilitator with the Open Textbook Network, and the associate editor of NOBA Psychology.