Choosing How to Write the World

Over the past several years, I have been working to open my pedagogy. I strive to find ways for students to write their world- write about what is important or interesting to them that relates to our class topics, write for their class or a wider audience, write in different genres and lengths. I seek to prioritize flexibility and student choice, on the grounds that students are the experts in how they learn best. It’s still very much a work in progress, but I’ve found that a combination of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Assignments with a focus on blogging and a variety of public-facing authentic assignment options, coupled with modified self-grading and completely flexible due dates has been extremely successful at increasing student engagement and student learning.

Individual Solutions to Systemic Problems

Before I describe my pedagogical practices in detail, I wil greet some of the elephants in the room. First, my exploration of open educational practices grows out of seeking ways to address the social justice crises and basic needs insufficiency facing so many of my students. Changing my class structures does not fix the systemic problems that students are struggling against. Secondly, I am a tenured full professor. I have professional and financial support and security that my contingent colleagues, who do the bulk of teaching in most university systems, do not have. I have found open pedagogy to be a useful approach to addressing both of these issues. By providing more choice and flexibility, I hope that students can persist and succeed in my class, building necessary reading, writing, critical thinking, and evidence-based argumentation skills they can use to work towards making the changes in their worlds that they want. By sharing my pedagogical work openly (all of the assignments referenced here are included as resources that anyone can copy, paste, and adapt as they choose), I hope to lighten the load of time-pressed faculty, contingent and full-time, who might wish to make some changes to their teaching but need assistance. In both cases, my work in the classroom is insufficient- the work to address these issues must continue outside of the classroom. I invite anyone reading this chapter to use the social annotation function to discuss these important questions, as well as the chapter as a whole- what is missing, what can be done, and how should we try to do it?

What is Open Pedagogy?

Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani define open pedagogy in the following way:

“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims.”

– “Open Pedagogy” Open Pedagogy Notebook

It’s a radically open approach to learning, which is a bit hard to define. Maha Bali offers a further clarification:

“Open pedagogy is an ethos that has two major components:

• A belief in the potential of openness and sharing to improve learning
• A social justice orientation – caring about equity, with openness as one way to achieve this”

– What is Open Pedagogy Anyway?

These two quotes, along with inspiration from many other open teachers and learners, inform my pedagogy at every stage of the process, from syllabus and assignment design to lesson planning through submitting of final grades and revising my classes for the following semester.

Figure 1: A visual representation of my open pedagogy

Choose Your Own Adventure Overview

I explain on my syllabi and during the first several classes that we will be doing things a bit differently, because this course takes an open pedagogy approach to teaching, and will use modified self-grading for all written assessments. I try to impress upon the students that I understand that they are all adults with complex lives and needs, so all due dates are flexible, so they can do their best learning and work in the ways that work best for them.

The cornerstone of this approach is the List of Adventures - a list of 19 different learning activities that students can choose to do throughout the semester. Each adventure is allotted a maximum amount of points possible, ranging from 5 to 20. Some assignments will look very familiar, such as midterm and final exams and a scholarly book review, while others may be more surprising (a meme assignment, collaborative note-taking, 2 sentence chapter) and lots of things in between. Students are required to blog each week and to participate in class- the rest of the assignments they choose are completely up to them. All adventures are described in detail (with requirements and grading parameters) on the List of Adventures or on individual assignment sheets which are linked to the list of Adventures and available on the first day of class. Students set a goal for themselves- what letter grade do they want to get, and how many points do they need to earn to achieve it according to the scale in Table 1, which is also on the syllabus. Then they choose which assignments they wish to complete to obtain those points.

Table 1: Letter Grade to Point Exchange

The Choose Your Own Adventure approach allows students to tailor the course to their interests and needs, which can vary widely among students in an introductory level class that fulfills general education requirements. Some students are planning on a career in social science, and they wish to do challenging, scholarly work because those are the skills they will need to develop for their upper level courses and career path. Other students are already committed to very different career paths, such as nursing or biology- while the content we will cover is valuable to them, and the essential skills of researching and backing up their claims with evidence are extremely useful and transferable, reading an entire scholarly book in political science may not be worth their time, in which case, they can select other assignments to get the points they desire.

Beyond the selection of assignments, I try to include student choice and openness within each assignment as well. For example, both the book and film review, students choose books or films that are interesting to them: perhaps because they are relevant to their major or career plan such as a student who is a CRJ major picking a documentary about privatized prison contractors or a student interested in librarianship selecting a book about the role of librarians in intelligence services during World War II. This approach not only gives students more autonomy, it enriches our class discussions far more than assigning a common book or film would- students can bring what they learn from doing their work outside of class into class, and since they’re all working on different things, students get to learn from each other instead of just the instructor. This networked learning is further enhanced by collecting all assignments via their blogs- students can read each others’ work to learn from it; sharing their assignments via blog also gives them a specific, real audience for their work (even for those students who are choosing to blog inside of our Blackboard shell- the audience is the class who all have access to the class blog).

I try to build self-reflection into the course by having students set their own goals/plan out their semester in their first blog post, then requiring them to revisit that plan in a midterm self-assessment post, and finally writing a final blog post reviewing their own work and progress. This metacognition practice helps students take ownership of their learning. The choose your own adventure approach also gives students more control over their own grade- since there are approximately 200 points available, students can see how their points are stacking up over time, and adjust their work accordingly. No one ever needs to request extra credit, because there are 100 extra points there for the taking.

I will describe several of the assignment options below, but please see the linked resource for the full List of Adventures:

Blogging

Weekly blogging is one of the required adventures- all students must blog, but they can choose where and about what they wish to blog, as long as it relates to the class topic for the week. I require blogging as the means of weekly writing for a number of reasons, which are communicated to students on the Blogging instruction sheet. First, I have not found that discussion boards yield very much discussion- just individual posts with superficial comments, i.e., a blog! So this way, it’s easier for each student to see their work, and how it accumulates and develops throughout the semester. Engaging with course topics in a short written piece will help students sort out complicated topics, and the freedom of blogging should help students choose what they are most interested in thinking and writing about. Regular writing practice makes anyone a better writer, whether they’re already comfortable with writing or not. Finally, the class blogs are meant to be open, to either the class or the wider web, whichever a student chooses, so students can write for a specific audience and learn from each other. The blog instruction description is:

“Reflecting on learning is an essential part of learning, so each week, you’ll write reflections in the form of blog posts. Please write at least 1 blog each week that relates to the reading (could be the best and worst things you learned in the reading, most and least favorite, a related contemporary issue, etc). Some weeks you will be asked to write an additional blog post about your learning process or journey, such as the goal-setting, midterm check-in, and final wrap-up. Of course, you are welcome to write additional posts if you like. Remember to include links to what you are talking about (whether it's from your assigned readings, or a relevant news article you're writing about, or a website with data, etc). Aim for for 3-4 well-written (spell-checked and proof-read!) paragraphs for each post. You will grade yourself on how well you met the requirements for weekly blogging at the end of the semester in your final blog.”

I read students’ blogs each week, offering digital comments and referencing them in our class discussions and my weekly email when appropriate. Blogging has been extremely successful in all of my classes. Of course, not all students blog every single week, but since there is flexibility in the due dates, students who fall behind know they can catch up. Students who blog consistently throughout the semester show marked improvements in their writing.

Meme Assignment

The first larger scale assignment (15 points) is the Meme Assignment, which requires students to create a meme that relates to the class, then write a short essay explaining the meme, using at least one in-text citation of their course readings (or another scholarly source). The assignment sheet includes a rubric to aid in their self-grading assessment as well as detailed instructions for how to write a self-grading assessment as it is the first time in the class they are being asked to write one. Many students choose this assignment, and they do excellent work. Embedded in the assignment are several important learning skills, but they are packaged in a very accessible way. Once a student has made a meme, it is easier to explain what they made as they have a reference- this helps give structure to their essay, which otherwise might be an overwhelming task for the first few weeks of the semester. In needing to use only one citation, students can get comfortable with the purpose and mechanics of citation, without getting completely overwhelmed. Students can see and learn from each others’ memes, and many of the memes are so funny and apt that I request permission to include them in the slides I use for class. Going forward, students will be invited to contribute their meme to a growing archive for future students to enjoy.

10 Minute Class

One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, so I invite students to select something they think is important and teach it to a group of people (could be their family, their friends, a scout or church or youth or community group, etc.). Students must design and teach a 5 minute lesson, and handle 5 minutes of Q & A from the group. When they’re done, they write up a blog post about what they did: how they set up the class, how they prepared, what they did, how their audience reacted, and what they learned from the experience. I require that any materials (handouts, slides, etc) that they used in the lesson be included in their blog post. The prompt for this assignment is very short, and the assignment is extremely open- teach something to someone and tell us about it. It is a bit scary as a professor to give an assignment to students with so few instructions or requirements- how am I even supposed to grade that? But since students grade themselves (explaining how what they did met the requirements of the assignment), I don’t have to worry about how I will grade their work- they are doing it. This freedom has yielded an astoundingly high quality and variety of work. One student taught a very successful class to her little sister who was quite young. She explained the US Electoral College with Barbie Dolls, since using manipulables was age-appropriate for her “student.” Ayat taught a class to their family, translating the most relevant parts of our class which is conducted in English into the language they speak at home, and highlighting civil rights and religious discrimination, a topic which they knew would be of interest to their father.

Design Your Own Assignment

Students who have an idea for an assignment that would further their learning that is not already an option on the list of adventures may design their own assignment. Some ideas include: a photo essay, video, song, Tik-Tok series, sculpture, or anything else. This gives students who have an interest or skill outside of class a chance to use that interest to learn about our class topics. Students wishing to choose this adventure must initiate discussion with me no later than one month before the end of the semester to develop their project proposal, which ensures that the scope and scale are sufficient and manageable. The process of project development is part of the learning experience, and has led to very interesting projects.

Safety and Privacy

Open learning should never be forced on students, and informed consent for openness must be continually obtained. As Matthew Cheney explains in “How Public? Why Public?”, learning in the open is not without its risks, so it is important to understand possible harms as well as the fact that these risks are not evenly distributed amongst all students. Extreme examples might include students who fear retaliation from their home government or those dealing with domestic violence or current/prior legal issues. Even in the absence of such individual needs, sharing their work on the open web exposes students to the risk of trolling, harassment, or worse. Additionally, online harassment and safety threats to public scholars are not born equally; those from marginalized backgrounds (whether race, ethnicity, gender, LGBTQIA status, etc) face much more harassment for public work than their white male counterparts.

In addition to their safety concerns, students have different interests in sharing their work publicly which must be respected. Some students may only wish to share with their own class, or be happy sharing on the open Internet but using a pseudonym, or be eager to develop their digital footprint by working openly under their actual name. Here again, I find that trusting students to make the decision that is best for them based on their individual needs (after a clear explanation of the risks/benefits). For this reason, I permit students to choose where and under what name they blog: they can choose to blog and share their work in our locked down Blackboard class, or on their own site (where they may use their own name or a pseudonym if they choose) linked to our class website. Students are permitted to change where and how they blog and share their work throughout the semester, and some do.

Because of the safety and privacy concerns of working in public, all assignments have a non-punitive non-public option. Even those assignments that are public-facing by nature, such as translating a week of slides that will be shared with future students or contributing to a collaboratively written chapter include the option not to share their work with anyone but me at no penalty.

Writing Their World as Emerging Scholars: Intellectual Property and Licensing

Initially, I found discussions of intellectual property and licensing to be out of place in my class, and it was hard to fit it in along with everything else we were trying to cover. It seemed like too much “extra.” The alternative, I came to realize, is not neutral- most professors (including myself until rather recently) think nothing of requiring students to submit work via a learning management system (whether or not they are also required to submit to digital plagiarism monitoring or other more insidious forms of surveillance) with no choice, no way to opt out, and no say in how their work is used or monetized by that platform(s). When this is the alternative, any time spent expressly discussing students’ intellectual property rights over their own work seems essential, not extra. Furthermore, discussions of intellectual property encourage students to see themselves as scholars (albeit emerging ones), who are learning how to participate in the scholarly conversation- how to make arguments and support their claims with evidence which they cite appropriately, because they are doing real work in the tradition of our discipline, which is an essential part of the learning objectives for my classes. Finally, focusing on students’ own intellectual property and their choice of how to use and share it provides a useful segue to discuss best practices for how they should use the intellectual property of others. This is a much more fruitful discussion than the threatening “don’t plagiarize or else” lecture that is often delivered (at least it was my own prior approach).

Managing Workload - How I Handle So Much Openness

Maximizing flexibility and student autonomy may appear to be more work for me as an instructor- since I give students the choice of where to blog and submit their work, I can’t just breeze through the Blackboard Grade Center, and since I have flexible due dates, I get work at all unpredictable times during the semester, usually with a big batch at the end of the semester. I began experimenting with these approaches because I was willing to bet the improvements to student learning, student work, and overall class experience would be more than worth the workload, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s actually not more work than my prior approach, with a lot less stress for both my students and I. I do get a lot of work at the end of the semester, but I can plan for it, setting aside work days to give meaningful feedback. I can allocate this time by getting ahead on my other responsibilities during the time I saved from not receiving the work earlier in the semester and having fewer time-intensive emails to respond to. I have not noticed a significant difference in the crunch at the end of the semester with this approach as compared to my previous one- the end of every semester is a bit of a mess, and enforcing student due dates never made it less of one, so I instead choose to plan for the mess and skip the stress of pretending that deadlines and structure will save me from it.

Workload Before and After: Deadlines

In the past, I felt like the best way I could prepare my students for “the real world” ahead of them was by enforcing due dates and penalties, because they need to understand consequences. But on reflection, this didn’t work well for students, was actually pretty infantilizing of students (who very much live in the real world already), and incredibly inauthentic to my own academic work. In my scholarly and professional work, I routinely request extensions, and as a consequence, I have become a tenured professor of political science. It did not make sense for me to impose strict deadlines on students when I don’t adhere to them myself. It also didn’t seem to work- because I had clear rules about due dates and procedures, but life does not care about the rules and due dates, especially for students who may be struggling financially or with mental and/or physical disabilities or who have work obligations or caring responsibilities for family members or children (or as CUNY institutional data shows us, several of these at once!). Emergencies happen, so when students emailed me about their emergencies, I had to spend a lot of time trying to calculate “fair” alternatives and extensions, while worrying about the equity implications of only granting exceptions or extensions to students who knew they could ask for them. Now, my students know that all due dates are flexible, so they can take the time they need to do their best work. And if they do email me, I can reply quickly to reassure them that all due dates are flexible and connect them to any campus resources that might be appropriate. Students are able to take the time they need to do their best learning with less worry. Making all due dates flexible has worked out to be a more compassionate, more effective, and, most surprisingly, more efficient approach than enforcing strict deadlines.

Workload Before and After: Academic Integrity

Before I adopted more open pedagogical practices, I felt like I had to enforce harsh rules to prevent plagiarism. I even used surveillance tools like digital plagiarism monitors in the battle to prevent plagiarism. It didn’t really work, of course- accidentally or intentionally, every semester, there would be problematic work submitted, and I would have to enforce the consequences outlined in my syllabus- enforcement, not learning is what was happening. Moreover, threatening students with failing grades or academic integrity notations on their transcripts takes up valuable time, which was usually focused around higher stakes assignments. Now, every class includes discussions of finding, evaluating, and citing sources of evidence for our statements in class and in their blogs. Since they do weekly low stakes writing on their blogs, students have a chance to practice and build their academic writing and citation skills, and I have the chance to offer feedback and guidance that they can actually use to improve throughout the course. Students have less incentive to plagiarize their work, since there are a variety of ways for them to earn points on instead of just one very high stakes research paper. Because the class is choose-your-own-adventure, students get to choose to do the assignments that work best for their learning and their life, reducing stress and the desperation that sometimes forces students to cut corners on their academic integrity.

Workload Before and After: Grading and Feedback

Finally, when I used more traditional course design and grading, I experienced many common (even cliche’) challenges. Frustration over writing the same comments over and over again, questioning whether students would even read the comments I was taking time to write, managing requests for extra-credit, worrying about the stress that students feel when they’re nervous about their grades, or having to take time to respond to grade-grubbing emails after the semester was over. By incorporating modified self-grading into the Choose Your Own Adventure course design, I switched the perspective on grading completely. I no longer had to write comments to justify the grade I was assigning- I now get to write more thoughtful feedback for students, engaging in their work and their self-grading reflection. The student work tends to be better as well- since students have to review the requirements for each assignment to write the self-assessment for their grade, they are able to see if they have missed anything prior to submission, in which case, they can revise their work before submitting it. They get full credit for doing the assignment fully, with less stress, and I get to give constructive feedback that isn’t about justifying a score or letter, since I’m only ratifying what they have assigned themselves.

Grades and Student Opinions

Final grades are at best an imperfect measurement of student learning, but even so, a comparison of final grades from before I adopted the more open approach and after is extremely convincing. Not only were there far more As in the open pedagogy sections, there were fewer Fs and Withdrawals as well- this approach helped more students earn higher grades, and had more students complete the course. The results are even more striking when one considers that the open pedagogy sections with better grades were the first three semesters of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the pre-open pedagogy sections were pre-pandemic. Even under extremely challenging circumstances, this approach contributed significantly to improving student outcomes.

Figure 2: Grade distributions from six semesters, three of which used open pedagogical practices and three of which did not.

Student reflections on their own learning provide richer answers to the question of whether this approach is worthwhile. When asked whether they like this approach, Ayat said, “I loved it, because I got a chance to do my assignment the way I want,” while Ramy said, “I like it because they are easy and it’s very clear it tells you what you need to do and also they are pretty simple if you look into them.”

Areas for Improvement

Dr. Loretta Brancaccio-Taras, the director of Kingsborough’s Center for e-Learning, included this simple yet enlightening phrase during a professional development seminar: “Choices are great, but they can lead to confusion,” and my experience certainly bears this out. With so much openness and an approach that may be very different from their other classes or previous experience, students can be overwhelmed by the choices, or unsure of what they are actually required to do. I do not see value in returning to my prior approach of rigid rules, so I need to continue to work on better messaging. I have simplified my syllabus, breaking it down from one unwieldy document into three linked ones- the syllabus, the list of adventures, and the course schedule. I then redesigned my course website to include the relevant information in multiple places- on their own page, as links in the link library on every page, and linked to each weekly announcement as appropriate. I added an FAQ page that explains each part of the approach in detail, so students can find answers themselves and I have a place to refer them to (which saves time typing out the same answer over and over again).

There are still students who find it confusing, so I still need to do a better job of communicating the approach in a way that is accessible to students. I keep a document of “Improvements for Next Semester” that I add to as things come up. This winter, I’ll be making a video tour of my course and approach (I’ll make it slightly general so it applies to all of my courses and won’t need to be redone for each section or semester), so students can watch it repeatedly if they like. I’ll also be coming up with a few “combo meals” of potential bundles of assignments, so students who want more guidance can choose from those as a starting point; I am indebted to Peter Santiago, the Associate Director of Kingsborough’s Access-Ability Services Office for this excellent idea.

Acknowledgements

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the CUNY Transformative Learning in the Humanities Fellowship, as well as my Cohort 4 colleagues whose work has inspired and improved my own significantly in this chapter and in my classroom: Yan Yang, Katherine Culkin, and Dino Sossi.