Yesterday, I joined the Rebus team again to talk about my experiences with open pedagogy for a webinar called Open Pedagogy Basics.
The organizers asked me lots of questions (shared in advance so I could think through them a bit), and one of the questions nudged me to put into words some things that have been knocking around in my head.
What can open pedagogy accomplish beyond the classroom? How can renewable assignments benefit local communities and the wider world?
I wrote out some answers before the session but didn’t read them exactly. I’m returning here to what I drafted and expanding on it. I think it’s going to be useful for the paper I’m preparing for Performing Citizenship.
The first and most straightforward answer to the question is that renewable assignments allow student work to reach the world. When students are doing real work that contributes to a real problem, that work reaches more people. The best example of this is teaching with Wikipedia, which allows students to improve the way controversial topics and underrepresented people are presented to the world. This can happen seamlessly because of the way Wikipedia is structured (Wiki Education is a brilliant resource if you want to do this sort of work). When students edit Wikipedia, it’s not hard for student work to reach millions of people. If you’re encouraging students to take the research they’re doing in your course and add reliable sources or entire articles to Wikipedia, more people than just your students benefit. You are contributing to the commons and that benefits everyone.
But I also think open pedagogy is doing something pretty transformative for higher education. I interpret the divisiveness in our culture as in part a reaction to a too rigid division between experts and the people who rely on knowledge from experts. When I started graduate school, I thought of the world as a place in which scholarly expertise was trusted and valued. But I think we can now see that this trust in experts isn’t something we can or should take for granted. We don’t want blind faith in experts, but we also don’t want people to so distrust experts that they create their own facts. I think what we want is respect for expertise. One can respectfully disagree or question an expert. One should do this! And one way to cultivate that respect is for experts to engage the world in knowledge production—interface with people who don’t have your expertise and invite them to share when your findings contradict their experiences in the world. I think this is a really valuable intervention for higher education, which can sometimes be too closed off.
