Data Analysis - Facet Two
Open Educational Practices (OEPr)
“The essential thing … is this: hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice” (Freire, 1992).I searched through the gatherings for an answer to my research question – As a teacher educator in Canada, what is it like to be an open educator? I probed each participant’s lived experiences of OEPr and specifically asked them to identify essential tenets of their OEPr (see Appendix D). For a clearer understanding of OEPr, I returned to review the literature for this concept (see Open Education section). The graphic rendering of conceptions of OEPr were also helpful (see Figure 7 and Figure 8).
While not every aspect of the participants’ lived experiences with OEPr was reflected here, the selected accounts generated from the data gatherings highlight facets of OEPr as I reflected on MDL in practice. From the participants responses, I selected three facets for scrutiny. These include access, choice, and connections. I began by examining the origin stories and concluded with a summation of the generated themes and core elements of OEPr.
Origin stories
Lived experiences with OEPr have origin stories. Most origins in OEPr don’t begin with a cataclysmic event, but are emergent and fluid. As I glimpsed these origin experiences facets of OEPr crystallized. For one participant, becoming an open teacher educator emerged from an early experience of teaching others how to canoe:Polaris reflected thatSo, I was instructing them how to hold the paddles and we were all standing on the dock because we’re all going to get into our own canoes. I explained, this is how you hold the paddle, and then I looked up and I remember seeing all the different ways that they were holding their paddles. And I’m thinking is this what learning is all about? Like I just told you, this is what you need to do. And yet you're like, we're not even in the water, you're not going to get anywhere. I remember that moment. And I think that open learning gave me that opportunity to let everyone paddle their own way. (Andromeda)
Some participants suggested that elements of OEPr were embedded in their philosophy and beliefs of how teaching should occur (Carina, Leonis). For one participant the impetus that pulled them to “open education is the social justice side, the decolonization has been really important to me. So, moving away from Western perspectives” (Sabik).it didn’t even occur to me that I was engaged in open educational practices … I hadn’t realized that what I’d already been doing (blogging & engaging my students with online publishing) had a name and was, in fact, a burgeoning movement!
For Andromeda, Aquila and Izar the origin story of OEPr occurred through experiences of focusing their dissertations on open education related topics. For Lyra it was the experience of “sharing my dissertation online, while not very exotic today, given the plethora of digital repositories full of theses & dissertations, was a bit unusual when few dissertations were open access”. Lyra noted the impact of openness in their scholarly work:
Andromeda, Aquila, Izar and Rigel reflected on experiences with free and open-source software (FOSS) and working with software development relating to education. For example:You know, so I think that openness and trust, the peer review, I learned early in my career, early as a scholar, that scholarly community of inquiry, when held in the open raises the level and quality of the work, because people all of a sudden realize it matters; what I put out there and attach my name to matters.
Another mentioned that their OEPr emerged, not from explicit institutional supports, but from the influences and directions offered by colleagues or others in educational technology who “share their kind of reflections and questions about what it means for them to be a teacher or a professor” (Merak). For Vega the lived experience with open education was grounded in feelings of unconditional hospitality and ethical relationality:I looked at open-source ideologies … so, my dissertation work was around the idea that, how do we apply these not only the methodologies, but also the ideologies around open-source practice into teacher communities … it was based on looking at open-source communities and seeing them as rich collaborative spaces (Aquila).
From these origin stories of participants’ lived experiences within OEPr, I noticed that negotiations appeared to reverberate through many of the interview transcripts – the “open learning part of the negotiation is working with your current context, cultural context, current boundaries, current world and then negotiating that that’s part of the negotiation as well” (Andromeda).… openness to ideas, and to listening to each other, to being attune to your intents of being there and impact so that when you’re there, you’re not trying to harm someone, like openness is not like open to being harmed. So, I think that the unconditional hospitality is to kind of recognize that when you’re a guest in someone else’s space, then there’s certain roles and responsibilities.
In an effort to gain clarity, the facets that are explored next are cleaved into subsections to better describe each element. Access is explored through notions of entry, intentionality, and language. Choice is examined through experiences with sharing, contributions, and agency. Connections are revealed through relationships, collaboration, and building on the learning of others.