Hiking Together: Open Pedagogy

Navigating your climb through open education can be daunting, especially when attempting to create an OER that will be relevant and useful for students. Throughout this journey, you have been asked to create a social justice-aligned OER for your students. We ask you to go beyond using inclusive examples reflective of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism (DEIA) principles. To achieve Lambert’s (2018) social justice peak of open education, you need to create a space where historically marginalized individuals and groups can tell their own stories.^[1] It is a climb no author can make on their own or even with a group of their faculty peers. In order for your OER to be relevant to the lived experiences of your students, you need to include and amplify their voices.

Open pedagogy is your clearest path to recognitive justice. Through open pedagogy, your students can contribute content to your OER. With principles based in care, your students and you can create a respectful learning community that prioritizes students’ learning needs and educational, intellectual property, and privacy rights. In such a community, students’ professional aspirations and lived experiences are valued and fostered. Students feel motivated to create accurate and meaningful work that will help others and their peers learn^[2] As for you, you will always have many minds to navigate tough terrain and helping hands to set up camp. Your load will be lighter, and your students will have agency in their own educational experiences.

Let’s discover how you can partner with your students to create a more inclusive and relevant OER.