Open pedagogy empowers students to be active agents in their learning by developing materials, collaboration, sharing ideas, and participatory activities. It is an emerging and evolving approach to instructional design with a limited research base, various definitions, and untapped potential. We define open pedagogy as students completing assignments that are useful and visible to others, rather than traditional assignments that are transactional and shared only privately with an instructor. In this presentation, we share our qualitative study of 75 community college students at two different institutions across the United States. We chose to study community college students because persistence is critical to consider for historically underrepresented groups, who are the predominant consumer of community college courses yet have the lowest persistence rates. To improve persistence rates, institutions are somewhat limited, and in the end, they can only manipulate things such as learner support systems and instructional designs. Open pedagogy is one such instructional design that holds promise because students from historically underrepresented groups often feel disconnected from their learning, which, in part, likely contributes to their diminished persistence. Some suggest instructors using open pedagogy assignments might bridge students to their learning and nurture persistence, as students share their work with others and give voice to topics and issues that are important to them. Yet, the empirical research base is limited as too are specific recommendations for practitioners. To address the research gap and glean insights into responsive instructional design, we explore student perceptions concerning the value of open pedagogy activities relative to traditional teaching approaches. It is important to consider students’ values because the research indicates the more students value an activity, the more motivated they will be to complete and do well with the activity, which leads to learning, better outcomes, success, and persistence. Even though open pedagogy is valued by students and can make space for supporting equitable practice, barriers, and misconceptions around sharing work publicly begin to emerge from our findings that are not as evident for privately shared assignments. Instructors must address these barriers and misconceptions to avoid assignments that put students in situations that are not conducive to learning and might impact their persistence. In our presentation, we share our findings and instructional moves instructors can make using open pedagogy practices to create more inclusive and equitable learning experiences for all.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Understand open pedagogy
- Understand the role of student values as they pertain to open pedagogy design
- Apply our findings to create make for more inclusive and equitable learning experiences for all students
