Open pedagogy is not a wholly unique or new concept. Rather, for several decades the evolving term encapsulates a myriad of approaches to students sharing their knowledge with a greater learning community, as the dynamic duo Robin DeRosa and Rajiv  Jhangiani synthesized. Many of you have already experienced open pedagogy as a student, researcher, and faculty member. Here, we will overview some of the evolving definitions of open pedagogy and pause for you to reflect how it may align with your own teaching practices and philosophy.

The many definitions of open pedagogy

Using OER the same way we used commercial textbooks misses the point. It’s like driving an airplane down the road […] Driving an airplane around, simply because driving is how we always traveled in the past, squanders the huge potential of the airplane (Wiley, 2013).

Foundational Wiley

The early years of the modern open pedagogy movement were largely shaped by the open access movement and open education’s dependence on open licenses to make learning materials freely and immediately discoverable online.

The ubiquitous David Wiley first articulated the current definition of open pedagogy in 2013. For Wiley, open pedagogy was an instructional approach inherently tied to replacing commercial textbooks with OER. That is, the open licensing of OER enables instructors to revise and remix how they can teach.

Select the arrows to review Wiley’s Five R’s of OER:

Renewable assignments became Wiley’s chief example of how to interject instruction with the principles of the open movement, encapsulated by his Five R’s of OER (retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute). The OER advocate defined renewable assignments in opposition to disposable assignments. Disposable assignments were ones that students created expressly for the purposes of the class and discarded after their exclusive audience, their instructor, graded their work. Renewable assignments, Wiley marveled, would allow students to create instructional materials for their course OER. Through a trust-building collaboration, teachers provide students with transparent expectations, examples, and constructive feedback for revisions, while students engage in reciprocal teaching and learning by contributing to the OER, such as a Wikipedia assignment.

Remixing and creating openly licensed content was key for Wiley. So much so that Wiley joined John Hilton, III in renaming his approach OER-enabled pedagogy,^[1] cementing their centrality of OER creation to the pedagogical practice.

Open Pedagogy and Social Justice

Open Pedagogy […] 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.  — Jhangiani & DeRosa, Open Pedagogy NotebookWiley and Hilton’s adoption of OER-enabled pedagogy served as a response to a proliferation of definitions for open pedagogy that may or may not accept their OER rider. In a widely circulated piece, Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa articulated a greater emphasis on working with student-creators. Invoking Paulo Freire, the duo nudged the community to merge “OER advocacy with the kinds of pedagogical approaches that focus on collaboration, connection, diversity, democracy, and critical assessments of educational tools and structures.” This, they explained, would enable practitioners “to understand the breadth and power of Open Pedagogy as a guiding praxis.”  They proposed an open praxis community that could generate endless approaches subject to the holistic needs of learners, who should be “empowered to shape the world as they encounter it.”  Jhangiani and DeRosa envisioned an open teaching to move from student-centered to student-driven learning, centering social justice principles. Jhangiani and DeRosa did not necessarily depart from Wiley’s definition of open pedagogy, but prompted the open education community to broadly reimagine how they could learn with and from their students to benefit the world beyond a classroom.

While DeRosa and Jhangiani articulated open pedagogy’s turn toward social justice, Sarah R. Lambert provided guiding stars to help practitioners chart their journey. As you will recall, Lambert vocalized the need to expand the open education’s social justice mission beyond the interrelated issues of open access and open licensing with her Three R’s.

Select the arrows to review Lambert’s Three R’s.

After consolidating Wiley’s Five R’s into one R, redistributive justice, Lambert improvised two additional R’s: recognitive and representational justices. These newly defined R’s of open education called upon creators to intentionally include socio-culture diversity in their OER and co-create OER with marginalized individuals and people, so that they may “speak for themselves, and not have their stories told by others” (Lambert, 2018). Lambert effectively challenged open pedagogists to reconsider how their practice could be more culturally respectful and inclusive of non-white voices and experiences. Better yet, Lambert provided a practical framework for practitioners to take action.

Open Praxis

Articulating discrete and achievable goals is essential to creating movement.

Prime examples of how to do this work are seen in an analysis of common open pedagogy assignments by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, and Jhangiani (2020) The three practitioners evaluated how assignments failed to meet and could be improved upon three criteria of social justice-focused open pedagogy:

1. From content-centric (main goal to create OER) to process-centric (main goal for learners to interact with each other);
2. From teacher-centric (teacher handles most of process of openness; e.g. teacher create an OER without student input) to learner-centric (students participate in open processes; e.g. student create an OER);
3. From primarily pedagogical to primarily social justice focused. If primarily social justice focused, we can consider the degree to which it addresses or more of the below:
   1. Economic injustice/redistributive justice (ensuring access to a learning experience);
   2. Cultural/recognitive justice (learners can see their culture in learning experience);
   3. Political injustice/representational justice (students and people of diverse identities and marginalized groups have agency in transforming the assignment)

The authors then demonstrated how these specific social justice and pedagogical elements could transform typical open assignments. Below are a few of their examples in an abridgment of Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani’s table of examples.

Student-created OER/content​

The authors’ scaffolding of the transformative results of social justice principles demonstrate how mindful changes to an assignment can further Lambert’s vision. For instance, having students contribute to Wikipedia has a good end goal of understanding the information creation process or dispelling the myths of Wikipedia. But instructors should be thoughtful about the needs and voices of all students for the assignment. Being thoughtful about topic selection, how students can self-represent through topics relevant to their lived experiences, and how to prepare and protect vulnerable, novice learners for the site’s editing wars. Taking such a student-centered approach to social justice-minded open pedagogy is not easy, but Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani’s guidelines are an example of the many blue prints that exist in the open pedagogy community.

Still open to interpretation

Open Pedagogy is “teaching and learning practices and environments that promote equity, collaboration, and innovation and invite students to create and share knowledge with future publics, often with the use of open educational resources.” — Tiffani Tijerina, Pedagogy Opened

Lambert and many practitioners have taken off with Wiley’s call to use OER to transform their teaching practices. The interjection of social justice principles opened a new flow of too many ideas, theories, and practices to enumerate here. Tiffani Tijerina, editor of Pedagogy Opened: Innovative Theory and Practice, offered a simple definition of our evolving open pedagogy practices. As seen in the block quote, Tijerina centers essentials to the new open pedagogy — “equity, collaboration, and innovation” with student-partners in furthering public knowledge. Centering students and their learning and holistic needs can help you design assignments that empower students to represent and improve their worlds.

You may also notice that Tijerina does not mandate the contribution to an OER like Wiley does. Including student work in your OER can be a useful way to keep your open textbook relevant to students and up-to-date. But doing so may not be in the best interests of your students or your teaching process. You can examine Tijerina’s social justice-themed case studies for relatable teaching and learning experiences.

Next steps

These are some of the broad-stroked definitions of open pedagogy. While there are some unifying principles, such as student sharing their work, there is yet to be a singular unifying definition of open pedagogy. We are still iterating. Personally, we like this because we can adapt open pedagogy to our needs as teachers who are learning (us) and learners who are teaching (students). In our workshop, we will discuss additional viewpoints.

After we explore the many iterations of open pedagogy, we will delve into Wiley’s disposable and renewable assignments. For now we hope you take some time to pause and reflect on what open pedagogy means to your teaching and learning practices.