Defining Open Pedagogy

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.^[1] Many of you have already experienced open pedagogy as a student, researcher, and faculty member.^[2] Here, we will overview the evolution of open pedagogy from an OER-based learning practice to a social justice framework. We will pause at the end for you to survey how open pedagogy may align with your own teaching practices and philosophy.

OER-Enabled

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.^[3]

The ubiquitous David Wiley first articulated the current definition of open pedagogy in 2013^[4]. For Wiley, faculty would feel empowered to use OER because open licensing and open pedagogy would enable them to partner with students in revising and remixing OER. The 5 R’s were essential to practicing open pedagogy.

Select the arrows to review Wiley’s 5 R’s of OER:

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. — David Wiley^[5] Renewable assignments became Wiley’s chief example of how his Five R’s of OER could revolutionize student learning.^[6] 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, on the other hand, 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 were key for Wiley. So much so that Wiley joined John Hilton, III in renaming his approach OER-enabled pedagogy,^[7] cementing their centrality of OER creation to the pedagogical practice.^[8]

We’ll discuss these assignment types more in “Disposable and Renewable Assignments.”

Social Justice Focus

Wiley and Hilton’s adoption of OER-enabled pedagogy essentialized open pedagogy to the use of OER and spawned a proliferation of responses. The center of open pedagogy has shifted from the OER output to students and their learning needs; Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa articulated a greater emphasis on working with student-creators. Invoking educational theorist 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.”^[9]

Sarah R. Lambert provided guiding stars to help practitioners chart their journey to the integration of social justice into open education. 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.^[10]

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-cultural 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.”^[11] Lambert effectively challenged open pedagogists to reconsider how their practice could be more culturally respectful and inclusive of non-white voices and experiences.

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^[12]

The definition of open pedagogy has greatly evolved since Wiley’s called for instructors to transform their teaching practices through OER use. The interjection of social justice principles opened a new flow of many more ideas, theories, and practices than enumerated here. 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.

If you are looking for simplicity, though, Tiffani Tijerina, editor of Pedagogy Opened: Innovative Theory and Practice, defines open pedagogy as partnering with students to promote “equity, collaboration, and innovation” to foster public knowledge, often through OER use.^[13] Centering students and their learning and holistic needs can help you design assignments that empower students to represent and improve their worlds.