Been thinking a lot about openness and #oep and whether a focus on student learning, while important, should be more ambitious and focus on social change. And yes, I realize this isn't a binary.— Dr. Tannis Morgan (@tanbob) June 1, 2020
Maha Bali's tweeted response links to a great article on the topic as well.
htThat's kind of what @thatpsychprof @catherinecronin & I focus on in our article in @JIME_journal about categorizing OEP (one dimension was empowering students or social justice orientation and the continuum)https://t.co/wbxhcllXDp— ℳąhą Bąℓi, PhD مها بالي 🌵 (@Bali_Maha) June 2, 2020
Open Educational Practice, or OEP, harkens
back to the social justice and radical pedagogies of the 1960s and 1970s,
in which students were encouraged to use their lived experience and combine it
with their formal educations to bring change to their communities and to world.
OEP suggests, and encourages, a more transformative approach to education, one
that goes beyond having students simply read about what others are doing or
what has happened elsewhere. It encourages students to interact and actively
engage with learning materials, to question them and to use them as building
blocks that can be enhanced by learners and shared with others long after a
course has ended. This learning process embedded in OEP treats learners as
producers of knowledge rather than as passive consumers. The goal of any
learning experience at an institution of higher learning should be to Inculcate
that mindset into learners, or rather, to encourage and direct learners’
existing impulses and inclinations toward constructive engagement with the
experience of learning in a university.
This ideal runs headlong, however, into the way most
universities are currently structured. Too many institutions are focused solely
on the education of the individual rather than the improvement of the societies
in which they operate. Some might speak to a mission of social betterment, but
for the most part, college courses are atomized experiences that don’t always
integrate with other courses, and usually don’t expect students to come
together to implement what they have learned. In this context, even in the best
of circumstances, improving society means providing access to those who might
not otherwise have the opportunity to earn a degree, and educating one learner
at a time. These learners would then go out into the world and make choices as
individuals: to earn a better living, engage with their communities, or to
advocate for change—it is entirely up to them how they use their educations.
And this is fine—we would not want to mandate how people should use what they have
learned once they leave our institutions.
The problem, instead, is with the institutions and the way
they see themselves. Just the idea of having students leave with a degree and
then “go into the world” is the problem: it means the universities somehow
exist outside of the world. There is no engagement with the society, except
when it comes to advocating for funding. Then, universities can show statistics
that demonstrate the increased economic viability of their graduates, the
number of jobs created by the operations of the school, and the improved social
environment that comes from having a university (ideally, one with a medical
school) located in your town. But they can’t, or don’t, demonstrate how much
they have empowered people to bring lasting social and political change. And
they are not organized in a way that would promote that sort of result. To take
OEP, for example: we may be empowering learners to engage with the world as
active participants—as activists, as citizens, as people who understand that
they themselves are the ones who can bring about change—but because of the way
a university is organized, learners are led to think of their power as
individual, not as social or collective. Universities don’t really do teach-ins
anymore, calls to action in which students were taught how to recognize their
power as a group and led (often by faculty members) to act in their
communities. (In fact, there were a
few hosted on Coursera a couple of years ago.) If we engage with our
communities, it is to partner with businesses or have students do one-day
clean-up projects in impoverished communities. Some institutions do encourage
students to volunteer in community organizations, and of course, many students
do that anyway, not needing their school’s encouragement or permission.
But how can we use OEP to promote social action, especially
now in the midst of the pandemic and the protests and violence that are
occurring daily in our communities? We might have helped our learners to be
more aware of the world around them, and to see themselves as individual actors
in addressing some of the social wrongs and inequities in their communities.
However, the institutions themselves are not doing much, aside from a few
perfunctory (and to be sure, a few heartfelt) statements issued by their
leadership. Perhaps universities need to adopt a specific point of view in
regard to the need for social change. Perhaps they—we—can facilitate
mobilization of students, staff, and faculty to be visible beacons of hope and
sites of action. Certainly such an approach would be true to our mission—these
would be educational experiences for all concerned, especially our communities,
who see us peering over our gates at them as they live their real lives in the
real world. Our ability to educate should not stop at the theoretical—without
action and implementation of the ideas we champion, all our talk of active
learning and OEP means little when our neighbors are under siege and we wring
our hands. Turning universities into organizers of community response might
also help us connect with our students, who see us as important institutions,
as moral touchstones, as a source of knowledge and application of that
knowledge (rightly or wrongly).
Otherwise, if we stand by and do nothing, we model a very
specific way of using the knowledge we facilitate. By encouraging our learners
to be active producers of knowledge, but then ourselves avoiding the struggles
of the “real world,” we demonstrate that knowledge and ideas translate into
nothing concrete. In this model, the best use of knowledge is to find a way
out, and to learn how to step lightly around the real problems of our community.
tps://twitter.com/tanbob/status/1267493671810678784?s=20https://twitter.com/tanbob/status/1267493671810678784?s=20
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