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Open at the Margins: Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley

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Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table Of Contents
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Introduction
  7. Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must be Confronted Head On
  8. From "Open" to Justice
  9. The Fallacy of “Open”
  10. A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content
  11. Decolonising the Collection, Analyses and Use of Student Data: A Tentative Exploration/Proposal
  12. Reflections on Generosity of Spirit: Barriers to Working in the Open
  13. Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley
  14. Open Education in Palestine: A Tool for Liberation
  15. Open Hearts, Open Minds, Crossed Purposes
  16. Antigonish 2.0: A Way for Higher Ed to Help Save the Web
  17. What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice
  18. Locks on our Bridges: Critical and Generative Lenses on Open Education
  19. Reclaiming Disruption
  20. Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms
  21. Queering Open Pedagogy
  22. Student Spotlight: Matthew Moore, The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, 2nd edition
  23. Open Education, Open Questions
  24. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Open Research and Education
  25. OER and the Language Problem (Part 2): The Status and Function Rationale
  26. Towards Openness Provocation for #oeb17: How to Create a Non-inclusive Learning Environment
  27. Queer Histories, Videotape, and the Ethics of Reuse
  28. Breaking Open: Ethics, Epistemology, Equity, and Power
  29. OER, CARE, Stewardship, and the Commons
  30. OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining
  31. Open as in Dangerous
  32. When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South
  33. What Open Education Taught Me
  34. The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation
  35. Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination
  36. The Future of the Public Mission of Universities
  37. The Tyranny of “Clear” Thinking
  38. Open Praxis: Three Perspectives, One Vision
  39. Holding the Line on Open in an Evolving Courseware Landscape
  40. Exploring Origins as a Decolonizing Practice
  41. Openness in Whose Interest?
  42. Logic and Rhetoric: The Problem with Digital Literacy
  43. Educational Content, Openness and Surveillance in the Digital Ecology
  44. A Reflection on Open: An Open Reflection
  45. Accessibility Assessment

7

Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley

Suzan Koseoglu

Originally published on April 21, 2017

What is Open Pedagogy? David Wiley recently asserted:

“…there’s apparently a temptation to characterize good educational practice as open educational practice.

But that’s not what open means.

As I’ve argued many times, the difference between free and open is that open is “free plus.” Free plus what? Free plus the 5R permissions. … open pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions. Or, to operationalize, open pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you are using OER.”

I’m, however, inclined to think about open pedagogy as a philosophy of teaching and learning that in its core, as Maha suggested, has an ethos of sharing and social justice. I’m under the spell of bell hooks right now so I will define open pedagogy as the way she frames it in her book Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope:

Intentional approaches in teaching that encourage students to have “the will to explore different perspectives and change one’s mind as new information is presented” (emphasis mine).

Open pedagogy may include the 5Rs of OER (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute content), or it may not; the discussion on 5Rs to me is simply an issue of method, not methodology (the broad philosophical orientation to the methods used). Open pedagogy might enable many methods, in other words ways of doing things, to achieve its goals. Take Clint Lalonde’s Digital Humanities students who shared their work online without open licenses, take the awesome open courses offered by the Virginia Commonwealth University (I wrote my dissertation on one of their courses). Are we saying that these educators haven’t been engaging in open pedagogy? That they were using some other method simply because their focus is not on 5Rs?

In a reflective post Sheila Mc Neill posted a resource by Bronwyn Hegarty titled Attributes of Open Pedagogy. This is more comprehensive than Wiley’s framing of open pedagogy but, again, I think there is a confusion here between the application of specific methods (which are context-dependent) and a larger paradigm of teaching and learning centering on sharing and social justice (or sharing for the aim of social justice).

bell hooks writes:

“Throughout my academic career I have sought the spaces of openness, fixing my attention less on the ways colleagues are closed and more and searching for the place of possibility” [for positive change].

What are our “spaces of possibility”? How do we construct those spaces and nurture democratic learning environments where people get exposed to different perspectives, challenge the way they view the world and their position in it? How can we help our students, and one another, have the will to learn enthusiastically and passionately, despite all the difficulties that come with deep learning?

Why does it matter to have this discussion on the meaning of open pedagogy? Because openness is contextual and messy. As Maha says:

“When we call anything “open” we need to clarify: What are we opening, how are we opening it, for whom, and why?”

I’m ending my post with a quote from Rajeev Balasubramanyam or this rant post will go forever. This piece is on artists’ responses to right wing politics but there is a lot we can apply to education. Rajeev says:

“The artist of faith is able not only to live inside of this uncertainty, but to create from it, to surrender to the unknown and, by doing so, to make peace with it. This is a political act not least because it is the one thing that fundamentalists of every hue will always oppose. Fundamentalists seek to erase uncertainty, to replace the unknown with crass, bludgeoning answers, but the writer of faith gazes into this void with open eyes, even, or perhaps particularly, when she is afraid, seeking to share what she sees with others in who find themselves in similar situations.”

*Watch and participate in the open pedagogy discussion here. More information is available on Maha’s blog.

About the Author

Suzan is a researcher and educator with a PhD in Learning Technologies, Curriculum and Instruction. Suzan’s recent research focuses on gender inequality and feminist theory and practice in open and distance learning. Suzan is on Twitter: @suzanKoseoglu, and occasionally blogs at https://differentreadings.com/

Other works:

ODL and Feminism: Looking Back to Move Forward

30 Years of Gender Inequality and Implications on Curriculum Design in Open and Distance Learning

Attribution

Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley by Suzan Koseoglu is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Copyright © 2020 by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani. Open at the Margins by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
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