Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 226 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Rajiv Jhangiani shares about Critical Open Pedagogy.

Production Credit: [00:00:14] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:24] Hello and welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:50] I’m thrilled to be welcoming to the show today, Rajiv Jhangiani. He is an expert in Critical Open Pedagogy and I’m thrilled to be having today’s conversation with him. Rajiv is a special adviser to the provost on open education and a psychology instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, Canada where he conducts research in open education and the scholarship of teaching and learning. A Co-Director of the Open Pedagogy Notebook with Robin DeRosa, Rajiv also serves as an Associate Editor of Psychology Learning and Teaching and is an ambassador for the Center for Open Science. His most recent book is Open the Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. Rajiv, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Rajiv: [00:01:44] Thank you so much Bonni. It’s a real thrill to be here.

Bonni: [00:01:47] It’s a thrill to have you on the show and I’m excited to be talking more about Open Education with you today. And let’s start right off, you travel all over the world, you’ve spoke to so many people and you’re so enveloped in this in your own campus- talk about why most of us get interested in open education.

Rajiv: [00:02:11] That’s a really good question. I think there are many reasons why, but I think certainly in North America probably the biggest reason that people learn about open education or perhaps start delving into it is really the question of access. I think around the world there’s a lot of sensitivity to barriers to access, even more serious than what you face in North America but certainly it’s still the case that higher education, even though it has this promise of being a vechicle for economic and social mobility, is still very much structured in ways that reinforce and replicate existing power structures.

Rajiv: [00:02:44] So whether you’re talking about legacy admissions on the one hand or something as mundane as textbook costs on the other, we are constantly finding that students who are already marginalized are being kept out of the system. So I think people come to open education because they learn about open educational resources, they learn that they can maybe swap out an expensive commercial textbook for a high quality open textbook, certainly they make their students lives easier. But of course then they learn that there’s a lot more to it than that.

Bonni: [00:03:13] Yeah. So you have shared that most people get really excited about OER and they come to OER for that cost savings but you’ve said that they stay for the pedagogy. Could you talk a little bit about how many of our teaching approaches change and transform as we become engaged in open education?

Rajiv: [00:03:38] Yes absolutely. And I think there’s no question that the central gift that open educational resources bring to students is that they make college more affordable. I mean just to lay it out a bit more. There’s actually no other consumer goods that grows in cost as much as commercial textbooks did. They started collecting records in 1977 and between then and now it’s been over a thousand percent. It’s pretty much always been between three and four times the rate of inflation.

Rajiv: [00:04:02] And we constantly find that students who are marginalized in various ways, they are first in their family to attend university, they are holding student loans, they’re working many hours a week, those are the ones that are trying to do without the books because of cost or choosing courses on the basis of cost and so on.

Rajiv: [00:04:19] But for faculty I think once we start adopting OER, it starts slowly where maybe you swap it out and you treat it the same. But of course what defines Open Educational Resources is not that they’re free, it is not that they are online, but it is the permissions. And so the permissions are typically called the 5Rs. David Wiley coined that. We’re talking about the rights to reuse. Absolutely. But also to revise, remix, retain and redistribute.

Rajiv: [00:04:46] And so for students reuse of course and then retain you get to keep it forever, you are not losing a leased e-book or anything like that. But for faculty it’s really about the division and remixing. So consider that we don’t have to bend courses to map on to the people of contents of a textbook. We can actually modify our instructional resources to serve up pedagogical goals.

Rajiv: [00:05:06] So we don’t have that to tell students “don’t read Chapter 4,” take it out. You know if you’re discipline like mine is meandering its way through a replicability crisis, you don’t have to wait three years to get a new edition to reflect those changes in the field, embed local examples and local statistics. And even if the least amount of advantage that faculty take off the permissions is to simply change the names of the people in the examples in the text to reflect the diversity of the classroom to make it more inclusive. I still think there is power to that.

Rajiv: [00:05:37] So for me it’s a lot about yes, you start with cost savings and I’m never going to understate the importance of that. I think it’s incredibly easy to forget how powerful that is for students. But for faculty, it’s really a reinvigoration of pedagogy.

Bonni: [00:05:53] I wonder if we could just talk through an example because I do love talking about the ideas but I also love about practically what it might look like. And since in your – your field crosses over a bit to mine because there’s the area of leadership that would be organizational psychology so I know enough to be dangerous of course.

Bonni: [00:06:13] One of the things I was very disappointed about in terms of the replicability crisis is some of the criticisms that have come up around the marshmallow study. And am I picking one that you’re familiar with the marshmallow study?

Rajiv: [00:06:26] Yeah.

Bonni: [00:06:27] Yeah. So for the listeners would you share with them what the marshmallow study is in case they’re not familiar with it?

Rajiv: [00:06:35] Sure. Yeah it’s a very famous old study. Classic in a sense where typically a young child is given a marshmallow and then given the option of eating a single marshmallow immediately or if they wait a certain length of time, perhaps 10 minutes even, they’re going to have two.

Rajiv: [00:06:51] And of course the experimenter leaves the room at this point, no doubt the student or in this case the child is being observed whether through a video camera or one way mirror. And really the question is whether they can delay gratification long enough. And they try to use this as a metric, as a test to really predict a set of life outcomes that stem from the ability to delay one’s gratification. But of course, as you noted, some of the more recent research has started a challenge that sort of simple narrative.

Bonni: [00:07:21] One of the things that I read- and I know I’m going to completely oversimplify- but was that for some of our more at risk students just use them as an example that they actually in their lives may have really benefited by the equivalent of eating that first marshmallow. If you are food insecure for example, then when food was provided to you it would not be to your benefit to not eat it and consume it right then. So again I’m totally oversimplifying but I wanted to just give that over arching example. A psychology professor may look at a textbook and say “I need to really do some revision here I have to modify how I’ve been teaching this and how the students learn about this.” So what would that look like Then for a psychology professor perhaps teaching Introduction to Psychology to revise an open textbook? What would be the practical steps they would take?

Rajiv: [00:08:17] I think there’s a number of things a faculty member can do by themselves. But really I think the magic of open pedagogy is when you throw it open not just to the faculty member but you also invite students to play an active role in shaping this public knowledge commons. So I often work with students- the simplest way would be to annotate. There are lovely open source annotation tools. One called Hypothesis, for example and I’m mentioning them because they are just wonderful citizens of the open education community.

Rajiv: [00:08:43] And I work with my students. So we’re using open textbooks and the students can highlight various bits of text and they can annotate it. In some cases, they can share their own experiences that illustrate particular phenomena to make it more comprehensible with a different example for future students. They might share external resources. On this case, they might really bring in and interrogate the reporting or description of the classic study by linking out to contemporary research which is not suggesting that again a single contemporary study is going to displace our understanding, but slowly as we sort of work with to the point where we can run meta analysis on this subject we can come to a clearer understanding of maybe the boundary conditions of certain effects and even if you don’t want to crowd the text in a particular textbook or even if it’s open textbook that much. I think the margins are a beautiful place for students to engage in a critical annotation exercise.

Bonni: [00:09:34] I just love your example so much. Maybe we could go through a few more of these R’s just this example. What about what would remixing look like for for example?

Rajiv: [00:09:45] Well remixing is typically when you’ve got more than one openly-licensed resource. So perhaps- you don’t even have to think about it in terms of different texts, although that could be the case- but perhaps there’s open licensed videos. So Ted Talks are openly licensed videos, for example. Maybe you want to bring in and embed a particular video in the middle of the text. Students could create brief instructional videos, openly license those. Remix within the text itself.

Rajiv: [00:10:12] But remixing is probably less popular than revision. And I think revision can take many forms. You can look at updating statistics, examples. You can look at contextualising as well, to look at local examples. So even though much of the research in our discipline has taken place in North America, this led to this problem of weird samples or to spell that out, samples that are drawn from Western educated industrialised rich and democratic countries. Checking to see how much that does generalize to a local context with a very different population. So I think the localization, the updating are some of the ways in which revision takes place as well.

Bonni: [00:10:55] You spoke about Hypothesis as a tool that a lot of faculty are using in the open education movement. Are there any other tools that you want to talk about specifically that faculty should be considering familiarizing themselves with in this effort? And then before we get to a really important idea of a critical lens on open education.

Rajiv: [00:11:17] Sure. I mean I think the beautiful thing about the technologies that I’m describing, so Hypothesis being one of the two others that I’ll talk about now are they are really open source software. So I think the added advantage is we’re talking about the ideology that’s baked into these platforms reflects the values of the Open Education Movement. We’re not sort of tying ourselves into a particular proprietary technology that can suddenly vanish overnight. It’s not also driven by venture capitalists seeking a massive return. So we’re not so worried about students data being monetized or hived in a particular way.

Rajiv: [00:11:50] So in addition to a Hypothesis, I would say the biggest tool is Pressbooks. Pressbooks is a plugin and theme for WordPress, which is again open source that has really become the backbone of the open textbook movement. It’s a free and open source software of course, but it really enables a wonderfully easy editing and creating process for open text books.

Rajiv: [00:12:12] The other piece also I’ll mention is a set of technologies called H5P which are wonderful, interactive technology that one can building in using HTML5. And all of these things play together. So for example, if I want to have an open textbook I find that it is like most open textbooks available in Pressbooks. I can download it. I can open it up. I can edit it. I can contextualize it. I can embed the examples I want. I can add in some H5P so that if I want my students as they are reading it to go through some formative quizzing with immediate feedback. If I want the images of brain anatomy to have clickable hotspots with more information coming out, H5P again enables that. And then when I publish it for my students, of course they can annotate it throughout the semester. Making the resource even richer for successive cohorts of students. So those would be my top 3.

Bonni: [00:13:09] Thank you so much for those and we could do an entire episode just on one of them, let alone all three of them. So I do appreciate you helping us out- we hear about the idea, we get inspired and then where some playgrounds might start experimenting in. When we start experimenting in this playground, one of the things that you’ve really helped me with and so many of us that want to do better for our students and just collectively around this area of access and open education is putting more of a critical lens on it. As we navigate through our experimentation and wanting to adopt some of these approaches, what are some of the top issues that you want to make sure that we are considering to really keep those values intact like you talked about earlier?

Rajiv: [00:14:00] Well I think for me- and I’m grateful that you think I’m able to help- this is a real struggle and it’s really challenging the status quo in so many ways. But I think in ways that allow as many faculty to rediscover the reason why we’ve gotten to education in the first place.

Rajiv: [00:14:17] So I think for me open pedagogy is really infused by two different things. On the one hand we’re talking about open licensing, open educational resources and that side of it. But on the other, it’s really critical pedagogy in the condition of Henry Giroux and others who’ve written about it. Thinking Paulo Freire, bell hooks.

Rajiv: [00:14:36] And so in that sense there’s definitely an activism that is quite explicit at least for me. And I think it’s something to shy away from. But when we talk about sort of critical approaches to this, I think it is important. One place to start I think is there’s a lot of discussions about access that simply ignores, forgets, dismisses questions of accessibility.

Rajiv: [00:14:57] And again who are we seeing higher education is reserved for? It’s not about just not systematically alienating a segment of our population. It’s about all benefiting from taking a more inclusive approach. So it’s like at the end of every conference presentation there’s usually the Q and A period and somebody will so I don’t need the mic. But the mic is not for you, it’s for the people in the room who are hard of hearing. And it’s that the thinking that I’d really like to trigger as people think about accessibility.

Bonni: [00:15:27] I love that example of being at a conference and I certainly don’t do that very often but that’s because I’m hard of hearing in one of my ears so it’s easy for me to empathize. But I absolutely know I do the equivalent in other aspects of my teaching. Could you give us a few more examples of where our desire for access ignores questions of accessibility?

Rajiv: [00:15:52] Yes absolutely. And there are different barriers, different challenges to this. One that again I think we get swept up in this notion of the digital will make it easier with the marginal cost of reproduction of resource approaching zero. But of course there’s digital redlining, which really looks at not just the digital divide but the causes of the digital divide.

Rajiv: [00:16:12] And I know you’ve had Chris Gilliard on your show and Chris has written really importantly about this issue and it also I think really demonstrates not just the issue and how problematic it is when you cannot assume that all of these students have access to the technology to the devices, to the Internet, or at least the right level of bandwidth for example. But it also I think illustrates how deeply existing power structures are embedded even at a subtle level in our policy vision decisions. So we cannot assume that digital delivery is good enough. We might be going in with the best of intentions but actually exacerbating and further marginalizing marginalize students.

Rajiv: [00:16:52] Few other areas if I may… Chris and I have had a chat about this. I think when we talk about access we focus usually on the students and that’s correct. But as someone who’s involved in a lot of OER creation, I believe it’s really important to get it on the side of the faculty as well. And especially when we’ve got increasingly precarious faculty working with increasingly precarious students. I don’t want it to be the case that the open education movement continues to over rely on uncompensated or under compensated labor. So I really think that ultimately we are making it only possible for people who are privileged, whether it’s through a tenured position or who don’t need the income, are wealthy enough to be in a position where they can create OER which again overrepresents that ideology of privilege In the examples, perhaps unintentionally.

Rajiv: [00:17:42] And then of course we can go deeper. We can talk about data privacy. Amy Collier has written really importantly about this. About how there is no such thing as a harmless collection of data or the benevolent collection of data and that these data privacy issues disproportionately affect the most vulnerable students. There’s questions about the edtech platforms. I alluded to this earlier. People like Audrey Watter and Jesse Stommel have really helped uncover and unpack some of those concerns before we sign that we are students rights on proprietary platforms.

Rajiv: [00:18:15] And then finally maybe I’ll just add even though this is a big discussion about critical open pedagogy that can go on. That agency should never be forgotten. But I think we might recognize the thrill and the advantages of authentic learning experiences that have students creating resources for the Commons instead of a sort of disposable throwaway research essay that might be their 20th. But they should have the agency giving them the choice not to.

Rajiv: [00:18:42] There are good reasons why students may not want to leave a digital footprint. So thinking it through, scaffolding when they have to develop an exercise new skills. Absolutely. But really remembering that not everything could be and not everything should be open. Open licensing is not a stick to beat people over the head with. You consider traditional knowledge that would be another area where a traditional creative commons licensing is not appropriate sometimes.

Bonni: [00:19:06] I think back to conversations I’ve been so honored to also get to speak to the people you mentioned, Amy Collier, although not about that topic of data privacy but in that case it was about notyetness and this idea encouraging us to not feel like we have to have it all figured out before we start experimenting in our own teaching. And Audrey Watters and Jesse. But one of the things that I think about is that sadly, I speak to these individuals or I think about people possibly listening to this podcast and it still surprises me and I don’t want it to in the sense that you know I like I wish I had a better way of discovering some of these things for myself- and not being informed of my own ignorance by these experts, is there a recommendation you have for us to allow us to put that new lens on in a more permanent way such that we can identify more clearly in our own contexts areas where we really need to grow and expand our own thinking and really get that critical lens?

Rajiv: [00:20:12] It’s interesting so many of these people who and listening over here happen to coalesce around a Hybrid Pedagogy, the Journal and of course Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute as well. So Amy, Jesse of course, Audrey and Chris have all spoken keynoted or led tracks at that institute. So I would say that for me that’s a real hub. It certainly attracts this kind of a critical discussion.

Rajiv: [00:20:34] But I do think it needs to be intentional. I think it’s far too easy to sort of follow along with the current practice. And even when you look at sort of list of what people are reading, invited keynotes at conferences. I think it’s very- it’s changing a bit- but it’s usually the case that critical conversations are the ones that are happening at the margins.

Rajiv: [00:20:54] So I think there’s that intention that’s required to send to the margins if you will. So a Hybrid Pedagogy is one of those rare places. And of course one of the recommendations as I was saving for the end, but I will provide it now is of course a collection that was just published by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris from Hybrid Pedagogy called An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. So I think that reflects many of these issues, but as a hub certainly Hybrid Pedagogy.

Bonni: [00:21:26] One of the things that I’ve been also inspired by so much out of many of the conversations on the podcast most specifically when DeRay McKesson was on recently has just the idea of proximity.

Bonni: [00:21:39] And I was thinking about recently there was an e-mail circulating around my institution having to do with computer labs and should we have the cost of manning a computer lab and all the upkeep? Or should we have some kind of a modified one to one strategy? At the time I was feeling rather snarky and I just wanted to write back and say “we don’t use enough open textbooks and if we just made a little bit of effort there we would save many computers times over.”

Bonni: [00:22:10] But anyway that was I’m going a little bit on a tangent, but I thought if you really wanted to know, go sit in the computer labs and talk to the people who use them. And talk more students. And really find a way to to the best way that we could put ourselves in their shoes.

Bonni: [00:22:28] Anyway, I just think a lot about the benefits to Yes. I mean oh my gosh. The people who have become these experts who are writing for Hybrid Pedagogy and leading workshops at Digital Pedagogy Lab are in close proximity with those students that have the biggest needs at our institutions. And I think that’s part of why they’re able to have that critical lens.

Rajiv: [00:22:50] I think so but I think it’s a really difficult position to be in sometimes because it goes back to Amy Collier’s concept of “notyetness.” There’s a vulnerability of practicing like this, being comfortable with releasing your work, your ideas before they’re fully classroom tested, before they fully peer reviewed. You are being transparent. You’re thinking openly. You’re sharing openly.

Rajiv: [00:23:12] And that certainly puts you at risk. And these people take that risk for all of our collective benefit. And I think we all should be immensely grateful to them. But that itself I think tells us that the ideology that’s baked into this is challenging. It’s an immensely liberating to practice openness. But it can be immensely threatening in terms of the mindset. I think that’s where the question of open pedagogy for me is, yes it’s about free but it’s also about freedom and being able to support that kind of work. It is not easy for many of these people.

Bonni: [00:23:49] Would you talk a little bit more about that freedom? I have not heard someone say that. So yes it’s about free, but also about freedom. Could you share a little bit more about freedom?

Rajiv: [00:24:00] Sure. I mean in an academic context we can always talk about academics is something that is increasingly under threat. No doubt. And we don’t think about it in the context of our teaching and learning resources. But of course, when we think about traditional copyright and how restrictive that is then of course it’s suddenly having the permission to do so much more.

Rajiv: [00:24:19] For students, I think a lot of it is moving away from what Freire described as the banking model of education. So giving them so much more agency in the context of their own learning where they can truly drive their own education. But then when you think more broadly about this maybe goes back to Henry Giroux over here where he talked about critical pedagogy and how expanding the public good promoting democratic social change he said the very heart of critical education and a precondition for global justice.

Rajiv: [00:24:52] So when I work with students and replace a research essay and have them instead work to produce resources in support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, that is very explicitly activist. Yes. In a way that allows students to see that their work has a larger purpose, they pour energy into it of course because they care about it. They see the world. But it certainly has a broader goal about the democratisation of education. But in a way that is explicitly anti-racist, de-colonial and of course open.

Bonni: [00:25:25] I have one last question. This is more of a selfish one, but I can’t be the only one that has this question. You just described such a powerful thing of having your students not do a throw away assignment but to actually contribute to the larger good. And when I have tried that before I’m just stunned by the excitement. I would even say exhilaration that just fills the room when they see the possibilities. But I would also say it is some of the most miserable experiences I’ve had teaching because from there just all kinds of messiness.

Bonni: [00:26:04] And I don’t want to go on too great of a tangent or sound like I’m complaining because I’m certainly not. I mean it’s so fun to see a classroom come alive like that. But then not having worked out about well people who don’t want to share, or some people think they want to share it at first and then they’re terrified later. And I’m just trying to navigate all that. I just feel like I’m clumsy. And does the clumsiness ever go away? Do you get better at this stuff? Or is it just like if you’re going to try this stuff Bonni, that’s always going to- it’s always going to feel like that? I mean what’s been your experience in coaching faculty on this?

Rajiv: [00:26:42] Why such beautiful clumsiness isn’t it. It’s clumsiness on our part as well.

Bonni: [00:26:46] It’s entirely on my part. It feels like yeah. Yeah.

Rajiv: [00:26:51] But I think part of the beauty of this is this is something we are figuring out together. This is- even though people have been practicing open pedagogy before that term was a thing, working on it together certainly helps. So we are discovering that there are ways in which we can protect students when needed, support them where absolutely necessary in terms of scaffolding. We can bake in the usual best practices. We can rely on revise/ resubmit processes, peer review. We can look at a number of ways in which identity can be protected. Work within the closed LMS if necessary for a certain point until the students are comfortable and perhaps the instructor judicates that the work has reached a certain threshold if that’s what we want to operate.

Rajiv: [00:27:35] But I think more than anything, along the way you quickly discover that there’s a range of information literacies and sometimes digital literacies that need to be taught when we’re stretching students in these ways. So there’s instructions for us, there’s instructions for them, but I think if we support them, if they make educated choices about what they want to do then suddenly we’re doing them a wonderful service.

Rajiv: [00:27:58] I would not want to force them to perform public scholarship ever. I think there’s different ways in which you can calibrate these exercises for students who are first year students versus senior students and do this sort of iteratively where again going back to this notion of our vulnerability, it could be students building on one another’s work, revising their work.

Rajiv: [00:28:18] And you see this happening all over the place. Ohio State University, there’s a book called Environmental Science Bites where students in the environmental science book have been writing these bite size chunks. The collection is edited by the faculty.

Rajiv: [00:28:32] Libre Texts another project based at UC Davis is a Wiki that’s controlled by factulty, and vetted by faculty but it’s written by students. It’s the most visited chemistry website in the world and it’s been built by students. The students creating videos all sorts of things. I think we have to approach it critically again.

Rajiv: [00:28:49] So it is exciting. And the work of people like the Wiki Education Foundation shows you really well these so these students how they feel about it. They are absolutely enthralled that their work has purpose, that they can sort of free work from behind paywalls and that my students work, when the edit Wikipedia is going to be read by thousands of more people than will ever read a peer reviewed articles that I published. And I think that’s beautiful. But yes, there’s messiness. It’s difficult. But I think hiding that and waiting to show the world this is the perfect product that was created by my perfect students in my perfectly forked out course is not a way that that practices education honestly.

Bonni: [00:29:27] Oh my gosh I’m going to have to relisten to the last three minutes of this episode about six times a day. That was so helpful. Thank you. I hope it was also helpful for listeners. I believe that it will be as we start to do this because you just really hit on so many things that I can do better. I need to recognize- I’m early- For example I’ve written with doctoral cohorts two open text books.

Bonni: [00:29:51] Oh my gosh it’s just like a huge learning curve. And I tried doing the revising and the second cohort just wasn’t interested at all, they were passionate and starting something new. And there’s so much I can do in the future, it’s always going to be messy. But there’s things that can make it less messy that you described so many techniques that you did. And I would love to link to these examples too in the show notes of Ohio State University, UC Davis, etc. So yeah that’s really helpful.

Rajiv: [00:30:20] Maybe it’s just worth adding over here. I think one of the mistakes we often make when when we want to experiment with open pedagogy is thinking I need to figure out how to do this myself, even if I’m copying what somebody else has already done. But it’s much easier to do this stuff collaboratively and there’s real benefits to it. So these collaborative open pedagogy projects across institutions, even within the same discipline, I think really incredibly powerful.

Bonni: [00:30:45] Would just share about the collaborative open project that you’ve started with Robin DeRosa? The open pedagogy notebook. Since that is an example of one.

Rajiv: [00:30:54] Yeah absolutely and I should say Robin of course is a hero of mine a just a champion. And one of these people who from the moment they went up to her and sort of modestly introduced myself to her as she has been my constant collaborator. And I’m blessed blessed blessed because of that.

Rajiv: [00:31:12] But she and I realized that so many faculty get excited about open pedagogy. And we, as you mentioned, worked with lots of institutions to help them in this space. But it’s much easier to practice it when you can see concrete examples in practice, perhaps even in your discipline.

Rajiv: [00:31:26] So the Open Pedagogy Notebook, which itself was inspired by a project out of Ontario by Terry Green called the Open Faculty Patchbook. It is really a space for community. So it’s a space where you can browse through examples, diverse examples at the assignment level, at the course level of how people are infusing their scholarship or their teaching practice with open pedagogy.

Rajiv: [00:31:46] But it’s also a place for you to share ideas, so on the front page even if it’s just a stubbles an idea that you haven’t tried out yet. We invite people to share because this is how we move forward is sharing and working and testing these ideas collaboratively. So it’s just openpedagogy.org And we may have designed this space, but the space is really owned by community.

Bonni: [00:32:09] And before we get to the recommendation segment, I’d love to have you share about your book entitled Open The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, so people can get their hands on it as well.

Rajiv: [00:32:22] Thank you. Yeah that was a real labor of love with my colleague Robert Biswas-Diener. I worked with him for a few years on an open education project in psychology. But we got to this point where even though we were working on open education mostly we were working of course within the context of a discipline that’s been dealing with some issues shall we say to address the replicability. And so we were looking at open education, but also open science practices. And inevitably also open access.

Rajiv: [00:32:52] And it became clear that these are in some sense different, distinct movements but they’ve been running parallel parts, they have different players. But I think they’re dealing with fundamentally similar issues and they have similar values. So we put together this volume, it’s an edited volumes. We approached people who we thought were really leading the discussion in many of these fields.

Rajiv: [00:33:12] Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science, Robin DeRosa of course and Scott Robison writing about the open pedagogy at the time, people who have started open access journals, and of course people across the open educational space as well. From Cable Green to Martin Weller, lots of others, a whole slew of librarians as well.

Rajiv: [00:33:32] So the book itself has been published with open license so people are thrilled when people continue to download it. It’s been out for about a year and a half now. But it really puts together I think accessible chapters by these leading experts in these different areas to better understand these three movements, what they share, what the challenges are, and what the path forward is.

Bonni: [00:33:54] I told you I was a big spender and spent ninety nine cents on the digital copy on Amazon.com so try not to you know spend that 50 cents all in one place.

Rajiv: [00:34:05] Well the funny thing is there was no way to upload it to Amazon without it being at least a dollar. So I do regret that. The publisher, Ubiquiti Press, you can just find it on their web site itself and download it absolutely for free. And more than that, if you want to translate it into a different language, if you want to adapt it for your context and republish it. You have our blessing.

Bonni: [00:34:27] so great. Well this is the point in the show where we each get to give our recommendations and I have two that are very closely related. The first has to do with season three of one of my favorite podcasts, it’s Radio Lab’s More Perfect podcast, and they just came out with season 3. And season 3 is- I’m going to say the most unique podcast idea I’ve ever heard of because they decided to focus on the amendments for the constitution. And they instead of your normal type of podcasting content which would be mostly just speaking. They had really famous musical artists create an album. So they have a new album which is my second recommendation is called 27: The Most Perfect Album. And it’s got musicians, some of which I did not- I’d never heard of before, but the most eclectic group of amazing musicians. There were mariachi artists. Dolly Parton wrote a song. A bunch of artists that are sort of indie artists I’ve never heard of before but ones that many of us would have heard of the like They Might Be Giants wrote a song about the third amendment. It’s just they let them choose which amendment they wanted to write a song about and it it’s just fascinating to see. So those of us that remember what it was like to have an album, an actual album you could hold in your hands.And so they have you know liner art that goes along with each one of these and then they have a podcast episode. And oh it’s amazing.

Rajiv: [00:36:04] Sounds like it would be a phenonemnal open pedagogy project, couldnt it? A range of contributions.

Bonni: [00:36:09] Exactly. Yeah I mean because I always think I’ve been learning more and more about universal design for learning and I’m doing that more in my own teaching and giving students choices about how they would like to learn and whether they want to turn the paper or do a video and that kind of thing. Never thought of having them write a song. I mean could you imagine? That’s just- what it what great examples too. So it’s so worth going and looking at the Web site downloading the music to your player and I can only imagine in that class how fun that would be. I love music just in general. But to play one of these songs and then get students. And speaking of Hypothesis you could get the lyrics and have them adding in their comments and annotations within the liner notes as well and the lyrics are just so powerful. So check those two things out the podcast and also the album 27: The Most Perfect Album.

Bonni: [00:37:00] And they will be linked to in the show notes. Today’s episode is 226 ,so teachinginhighered.com/226. And Rajiv, what do you have to recommend for us today?

Rajiv: [00:37:11] Well I started with four but I sort of gave away one already. The book by Jesse and Sean. So I have three remaining. One is a hashtag. One is an action. And one is a practice. So the hashtag is hopefully by now a famous one, #ScholarSunday. It was started by a wonderful wonderful person that of course is brilliant scholar, Raul Pacheco-Vega who works in Mexico. And he started this to help build community of course but help us to also share why we follow other scholars on Twitter for example. So you know every Sunday you will see this hashtag. I love using it as well. But bringing attention to that and following that and you’ll discover wonderful communities and brilliant and funny funny scholars through that hashtag.

Rajiv: [00:37:55] The second was a very concrete action which is go to Pateron, find Audrey Watters page and support Audrey Watters. She’s one of the very few, very very few critical voices interrogating educational technology. It’s not swept up, funded or coopted by Silicon Valley and the ideology of venture capitalism or surveillance capitalism for that matter. She really does need our support. And we need her more than she needs us. So I want to urge everyone to support Audrey if possible.

Rajiv: [00:38:25] And finally, just as a way of practice, I think some of our discussion earlier… I’m grateful, Bonni, you brought up the question of representation. We talked about centering work on the margins. But I also want to say it’s difficult I think when we leave it to the marginalized to always have to advocate for themselves. So I think the practices I’m talking about are things that could be small. That could be revising your syllabi to reflect work of diverse scholars from diverse backgrounds. It could be if you’re working within an institution, you’re seeing something like a word like collegiality being weaponized in order to suppress dissent. Speak out. And finally if you’re invited to speak at an event, the keynote, invited a talk or be on a panel ask about the Slate about the diversity of the slate of speakers and suggest names of speakers. Representation matters incredibly. And I think if you have the power and the privilege of already having been at the receiving end of an invitation, please use that. It matters more than you can imagine.

Bonni: [00:39:27] Thank you so much for expanding in our view of open education and helping us put this critical lens on it. Thank you for this hashtag, action and practice that we can integrate into our own work and continue the work of open.

Rajiv: [00:39:42] I’m deeply grateful to have been in this conversation with you. It inspires me, just listening to your podcasts and I’m really still pinching myself that I’m eventually going to appear on it.

Bonni: [00:39:53] Thank you so much. In case you couldn’t tell, there’s so much that I’m personally taking away from this episode in conversation with Rajiv Jhangiani. Rajiv, thank you so much. And thanks to all of you for listening.

Bonni: [00:40:07] If you want to write in and tell me the ways that you think you might be able to put into practice some of the guidance that Rajiv gave us, hop on over to the show notes that such teachinginhighered.com/226 and you can talk a little bit about how you can make your own pedagogy more open and more inclusive.

Bonni: [00:40:28] And thanks to all of you for sharing about the podcast with your colleagues. I just love seeing the community grow and to start to see more people listening and joining in these conversations. If you’d like to recommend the podcast, it’s usually easiest just to show them how easy it is to listen to a podcast. Thanks for listening. And I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.