Presentation Slides:
https://bit.ly/gc-opened21The Mina Rees Library (The Graduate Center, City University of New York) organizes an Open Pedagogy Fellowship for graduate students who themselves teach undergraduates. Each Fellow converts a course to Zero Textbook Cost, but the Fellowship is about much more than flipping a syllabus. Fellows examine the values that guide their pedagogy, and consider how open materials can transform assignments and classroom dynamics. Each Fellowship kicks off with a multi-day intensive that covers critical pedagogy, scholarly economics, and indigenous/localized knowledge production. In 2020, the intensive went virtual, prompting us to rethink our own pedagogy, and to include former Fellows as presenters and showcase their work as inspiration.
The intensive features workshops by multiple librarians on topics associated with open learning and research. These include presentations on archival resources, open access materials, critical pedagogy, and Creative Commons licenses. Presenters maximize participatory and active learning strategies, especially in sessions conducted over Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, one presenter divided the Fellows into four Zoom “rooms” and tasked them with evaluating an open access journal. They collectively determined whether or not they would use the journal as a source or submit their own research to it for publication, using the “Think. Check. Submit.” tool as a guide.
In our presentation, we will discuss the program as an in-depth intervention in the often narrowly-focused landscape of OER initiatives, which tend to highlight course cost as the primary and only concern. The Open Pedagogy Fellowship, given its context at the doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York, is positioned to impact scholarship going forward, starting with those on the path towards the PhD.
Since its first iteration in 2019, the Fellowship has also targeted diversity and equity as parallel components to OER. Audrey Watters spoke at our 2020 symposium “Towards an Open Future” — her perennial question “open for whom?” usually targets the EdTech elements in OER. It becomes a more pointed question when directed towards the underlying structural inequities of scholarship itself — the primarily Western focus of OA initiatives, creation of OER by UNESCO, and global aspirations for its goals. We seek to dive into the deeper questions raised by the Fellowship, as well as offering a practical framework for how to develop a similar initiative.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Articulate several approaches to open pedagogy beyond OER
- Understand how creating an OER syllabus can allow for a fuller transformation of course activities and classroom dynamics
- Imagine how to meaningfully engage graduate students at their own institutions with open pedagogy
- Consider how to broaden OER initiatives to also confront structural inequities in knowledge creation and dissemination
