Cultivating a Caring Community

Using OER shouldn’t just be about saving your students money. Let’s talk about how open education can transform the ways you teach through representational justice.^[1] The inclusion of student work in your OER will not only keep it updated and relevant to your most important users, but also increase learners’ sense of belonging in your course.^[2] In this chapter, we will define open pedagogy through its common attributes and discuss why students are motivated by this inclusive practice. We will wrap up with some general advice for how to build a caring community before asking you to reflect on how all this relates to your teaching.

What is Open Pedagogy?

Teachers have been practicing open pedagogy for decades^[3]. Despite this passage of time, however, and as we will discuss in the next chapter, there isn’t a common definition. Instead, open pedagogy is often defined by common practices and values. Many open pedagogy practices are rooted in familiar assignments reimagined to make courses more transparent and inclusive, to support students in peer-to-peer learning, or to introduce digital tools to improve students’ critical digital literacy.

Here are some examples of open pedagogy practice that include students:

• Creating projects focused on social justice with critical digital pedagogy skills^[4];
• Designing slide decks for a general Psychology course;^[5]
• Collaborating on a shared annotated bibliography;^[6]
• Benefiting from a variety of skill-building social learning projects.^[7]

If aspects of these projects sound familiar to you, chances are you have practiced elements of it as a learner or teacher. You may have asked students to publicly present their work, create and show a film, publish a newspaper article in the campus newspaper, or research and reflect on a local community project. All of these are iterations of open pedagogy.

Why practice open pedagogy?

Now that you have a sense of what constitutes open pedagogy, let’s briefly go over some of the reasons why open pedagogy will serve you and your students. Let’s start with the facts. Practitioners have validated the efficacy of open pedagogy through numerous research studies analyzing student perception and academic performance.

Let’s start with improved learning. Hilton and company found students preferred learning with open pedagogy rather than traditional papers and tests.^[16] A number of open pedagogy and OER studies have found open pedagogy affords students the opportunity to think critically and engage in more holistic learning that relates to their lived experiences and amplifies their voices beyond the classroom.^[17]

“It was more hands-on. It didn’t feel like ‘traditional’ learning. Rather, it was more interactive and felt more ‘life-like’ enabling me to learn the material, while also gaining real life skills,” reported a student learning with open pedagogy.^[18]Sharing work publicly can positively motivate students to share their perspectives for the common good. Learners capitalizing on the choice of publicly sharing their work voiced greater agency^[19]. With more opportunities to self-represent their identities in their learning. In alignment with Sarah R. Lambert’s representational justice, such students wanted to “share their stories and speak from their experiences” because of “the value of the knowledge in them and wanting to help others,” according to Virginia Clinton-Lisell and Lindsey Gwozdz.^[20]. Learners capitalizing on the choice of publicly sharing their work voiced greater agency^[21] With such positive experiences, it should be no surprise that students report “increased engagement and skills acquisition,” as students co-creating with Eric Werth and Katherine Williams did.^[22]

With such positive student feedback, perhaps it is not surprising that open pedagogy is gaining traction as an equity strategy in education.^[23] Adherents find the student-driven approach to open pedagogy fosters a greater sense of belonging in higher education for racial-ethnic minority and first-generation U.S. college students.^[24]

How do you practice open pedagogy?

We firmly believe that students, especially marginalized students or those from underserved communities, would not report such favorable experiences exerting their agency with open pedagogy if it weren’t for the caring, trusting, and inclusive communities built by their instructors.

Care

Care will be an undercurrent throughout our discussion of open pedagogy. During our introduction to open education, you may recall we discussed the CARE Framework for OER, which asks members of the OER community to express their care for each other by contributing, attributing, releasing, and empowering their own and each other’s work. The CARE Framework is applicable to your work with students.

Care is not a new concept to education, and Maha Bali, a leading open pedagogist, draws parallels between open pedagogy and the critical writings of bell hooks as well as hooks’s [centralization of care to building learning communities with students.^[25] Reflecting on her servant approach to teaching, hooks saw “committed acts of caring” as a way “to create the conditions for freedom” so that students could combat oppressive or dominating elements of educational systems.^[26]

Caring educators open the mind, allowing students to embrace a world of knowing that is always subject to change and challenge.”    bell hooks^[27]

But what do committed acts of caring look like? Deirdre Maultsaid and Michelle Harrison offer some how-to advice for building caring relationships with and among students through care and open pedagogy:^[28]

Select the plus sign (+) next to each word to read the advice for each.

While these are helpful tips, there is no perfect script for practicing open pedagogy.

It is important to note that care is not just for your students. It is for you as well. A pedagogy of care allows for vulnerability, encourages empathy and aid during times of struggle, Bali shares.^[29] Modeling such attentive behavior encouraged Bali’s students to mirror it in their treatment of not just Bali but their greater learning communities. For instance, when Bali fell ill during the pandemic, her students sent her their healing tips and volunteered to help during class. Through such reciprocal care, faculty and students are able to remove barriers for learning and thriving, building more equitable educational systems for each other. This mutual grace is important as you and your students learn what open pedagogy looks like in the context of your courses.

Ultimately, “open pedagogy involves centering care, empathy, and flexibility so that navigating these new learning experiences can lead to your own empowerment and growth,” summarized Jamie Witman, open educational practice specialist for the Open Education Network.^[30] Let’s engage with this empowerment and growth as we explore open pedagogy.

With this sentiment in the next chapters, we will define what open pedagogy could mean for your teaching practice and discuss practical ways to redesign and implement an assignment with students’ well-being and privacy in mind.