Beauchampa and Thomas (2009) argued that pre-teachers always experience a shift in identity throughout the years in teacher education. However, due to the pandemic, most pre-service teachers are not able to physically visit schools, mentor children, or practice teaching. Their growth in professionalism is somewhat invisible; many of them feel disconnected and unproductive. The authors of this study taught the same group of pre-service teachers in two literacy methods courses; they adopted an open pedagogy that involved students in creating open educational resources (Wiley, 2013) to support pre-service teachers communicating and exchanging knowledge with a wider range of audience. The ultimate goal of the open pedagogy is to facilitate pre-service teachers’ participation and production in professional discourse (Alsup, 2006).
In this presentation, we primarily discuss two open pedagogy practices carried out in two online literacy methods courses for eight pre-service teachers majoring in Elementary Education. The first practice involved having the pre-service teachers co-create online activities for promoting young children's phonemic awareness and phonics as well as record videos to explain why the activities were helpful in an online environment, followed by a short teaching demo. Then, they shared the videos on YouTube with an open license. In the second practice, we invited the pre-service teachers to do weekly blog postings on literacy strategies that focused on active and inclusive learning. Based on each week’s blog postings, the pre-service teachers synthesized, edited, and compiled the strategies that the whole class had developed throughout the semester, and then created an open-licensed ebook that best represented the students’ collective knowledge of their literacy strategies, educational resources, and teaching ideas for their own future use and for others.
We will share how and why we selected the open pedagogy practices, what challenges we encountered during enacting open pedagogy in teacher education courses, and how open pedagogy benefited the per-service teachers’ understanding of the new content and their professional identity development.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Get to know how to set up OER in classrooms and how to create open license for students' original work
- Understand the need to setting OER as well as the challenges of implementation
- Learn about examples of student-created OER
- Understand how OER helps with pre-service teachers' identity development
