An Interview with Colleen Birchett

We were excited to discuss O.E.R. and open pedagogy with Dr. Colleen Birchett, who has taught in the English Department at CityTech since 2010.

Can you speak to how students reacted to the O.E.R. course? We’d be interested to know if O.E.R. influenced your pedagogy/teaching style in any way.

We enjoyed the portability of the electronic resources. I was able to use hyperlinks to give students immediate access to resources related to specific topics, without their needing to do excessive independent research.  This increased the diversity of resources that they could use to complete specific aspects of various assignments. It also freed up time for them to do additional research on their own, and get more in depth understandings.

What was the most memorable part of the O.E.R. Fellowship for you?

I enjoyed having more control over the wide variety of resources that I could make available to the students, eliminating both the expense and irrelevance of more generic textbooks. One of the limitations that I've faced as an instructor is the fixed content in a given textbook: someone else decides, and that's their worldview or pedagogical view. Whose voices get heard and whose don't? One of the things O.E.R. allows you to do, is to modify that - as issues come up on the international/national scene, you can adapt it more easily than you can a textbook.

How do you imagine this open course will evolve over time?

The course, “Home Away From Home: Three Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories”, focused on three women from three specific parts of the world.  As the course evolves, I intend to incorporate the stories of women from a wider variety of countries and regions of the world.

What has stuck out to you the most as far as student feedback you’ve received?

For the first time, after teaching at NYCCT for ten years, my particular SET score rose above that of the Departmental Average for that section. WOW!!

We’d love to hear more about how O.E.R. is impacting your work now. Feel free to share about any current projects.

I have used my O.E.R. texts in not-for-profit settings. With such rave reviews, I intend to use some of them in social justice work where students are seeking writing skills to pass examinations for citizenship, etc.

Dr. Colleen Birchett has taught English Composition and Literature courses in CUNY since 2007. She has taught at New York City College of Technology since 2010. She has three Open Educational Resources posted in the Open Lab, and her O.E.R. course, “In the News,” is posted on Academia.Edu, where it has circulated to 150 educational institutions throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. Dr. Birchett holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Design, and her dissertation focused on the degree to which cognitive skills involved in writing are impacted by the zoom property of the television camera. She has also completed a M.Div in Theology and a M.S. in Journalism.