Our Adventure in Open Pedagogy

We were thinking big when our team began this project in January, 2024 at the University of Oregon. We met together for the first time around a table in a conference room, excited about the prospect of creating a student-led, online textbook for LING 144 Learning How to Learn Languages. We started the project with open minds, lots of energy, and a healthy dose of nervousness, not knowing exactly what would happen or what we would actually create.

And then… we did it.

Eight months later we are looking at ten completed chapters, each with multiple sections, fully illustrated and peppered with videos, interactive activities, and plenty of stories about what it can look like to learn a language.

We ended this month with a self-given score of 10/10, not because the product or process was perfect, but because we all navigated the journey with grit and grace and did not stop short of our best collective efforts. We are happy with the unique, ever-evolving aspects of this open-source text, just as we hope our readers will be happy about their own evolving journeys in language learning. As you will see in Chapter 1, we champion a focus on proficiency over trying to reach perfection.

An Overview of our Journey

This project began in Spring 2023 when Keli Yerian, a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics and a language teacher educator, applied for grant support to launch this Open Pedagogy initiative. The LING 144 course she had taught twice did not yet have a central text, and she had just been introduced to the concept of Open Pedagogy through a workshop sponsored by Open Oregon.

With support from the UO Williams Foundation, Open Oregon, and the College of Arts and Sciences, Keli enlisted Bibi Halima, her former LING 144 graduate Teaching Assistant, to be a co-collaborator and project manager on the project. Keli then put out a call to former LING 144 students to apply to join the project. The grant funding provided pay for student part-time work, ensuring equity of access to those who applied.

With a diverse and talented team of five undergraduates in place (three of whom were first year students), we began the Winter 2024 term with workshops on leadership and project management provided by the UO Holden Leadership Center in order to build team cohesion and identify our strengths. We had meetings with UO OER Librarian Rayne Vieger, who created OER materials specifically to guide our team. We also enlisted an experienced Open Pedagogy mentor for the project, Liz Pearce, to offer us advice at key stages in the project.

Over the first several weeks, we discussed and mapped out our book plan using whiteboards and sticky notes, while also learning how to use our collaborative and publishing tools: Teams for communication and project organization, OneDrive for drafts and initial peer review, H5P for interactive elements, Pressbooks for our final materials, and Hypothesis for final review.

Although the five students initially divided up the chapters to author individually, by the end of Winter term it became clear that specializing into different roles would work better in order to capitalize on student strengths. Three students continued to primarily write, while one began illustrating the whole book and the other focused on multimedia.

The team kept our gears turning through Spring break and into Spring term as we began planning for the final five chapters. Our regular meetings and weekly progress became increasingly more intensive, even as the students juggled their full-time schedules and other extra-curriculars. As Summer arrived, one team member graduated and moved on to a new commitment. The other four continued to revise and fill in missing content through mid-August as Halima and Keli engaged in full-time review, editing, and accessibility remediation. We were fortunate that one of our writers was awarded additional Summer funding through a UO Center for Undergraduate Research and Engagement scholarship.

We wrapped up our last group meeting on August 14, 2024 with a palpable sense of pride and accomplishment. One student compared the project to a bonsai tree: one we had carefully trimmed and shaped over time but had taken its own beautiful, unique form in the end.

Yes, we had done it.

Lessons and Reflections

In the poem, “Don’t Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve” Zagajewski reminds us that “knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth” (2003, p. 110). Similarly, our journey in this project revealed ‘lucid moments’ of insight over time. Before these moments dissolve or fade away, here we write them down and share them with you, hoping they light the way to a path in education that is open and brave.

From January to August, we gradually discovered the answer to ‘not knowing exactly what would happen’. One question became prominent as we observed our process unfold:

How does Open Pedagogy transform student and educator roles and relationships?

One word that repeatedly came up in our discussions with all students in several meetings was empowerment.  They took ownership of their learning and evolved beyond the feeling of imposter syndrome, beyond believing ‘I don’t know enough!’ Their empowerment by the end was evident in their confidence and positive self-image. In response to the question, ‘What specific skills and knowledge do feel you gained through this experience?’, one of the students said, ‘I want readers to know what I know, and it is worth sharing with them’.

Their empowerment allowed them to recognize us as facilitators rather than ’employers’ or ‘traditional teachers’. They could acknowledge our expertise and seek support when needed. They knew that their ‘I don’t knows’ would be met with the response ‘Let me help you here’. We together created a safe space between ‘We need to know everything’ and ‘We don’t know enough’. This is a space we call open and brave! This is where both learners and educators come together and are willing to learn and share with openness.

As educators, we embraced our fluid roles. For example, Keli with all her expertise and extensive background in language education transcended her role as a teacher and led the team from a fresh perspective as a learner. Whereas Halima, as a young scholar, inhabited the liminal space between Keli’s mentorship and mentoring the student team members while navigating her transnational identity and bridging two worlds as an international student.

Through the fluidity of our roles, we shifted from viewing our students as “followers” to acknowledging them as “contributors”. It is true that Open Pedagogy requires educators to be ” guide[s] by their side” rather than “sage[s] on the stage” or even “guide[s] on the side” (Werth & Williams, 2023, p. 309). This is the way to engage as learners together, side by side.

Learning How to Learn Languages was not just a matter of creating a textbook, but an experience of becoming together for our team. We all had our specific roles and responsibilities but every week we gathered around a table and trimmed and shaped our bonsai together. With our unique expertise and interests, we grew this project together. “Let me try sketching that out”, “Here, let me share a resource with you”, “Why don’t I add a story here?”, “I can get filming equipment for you”, “Here’s where we could add a touch of clarity”, “Here, let me try to clean this H5P on Procreate”, “Oh, leave that to me” were all our ways of supporting each other.

While the world is becoming increasingly commercialized, the OER movement and Open Pedagogy humanize education. Education is a basic human right to access freely and to participate in freely. It is our hope that through this kind of transformative human movement we will open up space for learners to emphasize democracy and agency in education.

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References

Werth, E., & Williams, K. (2023). Learning to be open: Instructor growth through open pedagogy. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 38(4), 301-314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2021.1970520

Zagajewski, A. (2003). Without end: New and selected poems (C. Cavanagh, & C. K. Williams, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.