Media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices: A post-intentional phenomenology

Facet 2.2: Choice

The lived experiences for teacher educators who practiced their craft openly meant providing choice in learning but also making choices for themselves as educators and researchers. This ranged from course design where access to tasks and activities were openly shared, where contributions were made and accessed in a variety of locations and modalities, and in recognizing issues surrounding agency and ownership within their OEPr. 

Sharing

All of the participants mentioned sharing processes and work products with colleagues and students. Rigel mentioned “sharing your process is a form of open pedagogy for me, so I feel like there’s a spectrum of sharing more broadly, and making it accessible for a broader audience is really helpful”. For Merak this involved practices that are 

more fluid or natural … because you've had access to that teaching explicitly or implicitly, versus someone else needing to say this is how you could perhaps better organize your desktop or your digital spaces.

For Perseus the issues and risks surrounding the open sharing of teaching and learning, particularly for marginalized students, revealed concerns with “whose needs, voices, insights are silenced or left out when we work in the open? Do we lean into difficult conversations about the risks of open”. The social justice side of open education was important to Sabik who noted their efforts to give “voice to scholars and to educators, to students, who traditionally don’t get to have their voices represented”. 

          The OEPr for Sabik and Rigel included consideration of how students are presented with options to share their learning beyond the “disposable assignment”, described by Wiley (2013) as those tasks, such as essays or exams, that add no value to the world, since they are thrown away and forgotten once they are completed. Rigel provided choice as a gateway “for students to become more open about how and where they share their learning”. Dorado suggested limiting choices for student assignments to a few selected tools that provide flexible options for sharing, since this can enhance creative outputs. For Aquila and Orion this meant including in their teaching practice the use of “aggregation and having students have their own space” to share their learning. Lyra reflected on their lived experiences:

In my teaching with both undergraduate and graduate students, I have always tended to include an assignment or two that involves online sharing, from student created blogs, podcasts, wikis, VR spaces, microblogging and twitter chats, and various types of co-created or individually created websites.

One caution posited by Andromeda, but reflected in the responses by others, was that sharing is “a negotiation and co-design between an instructor and the student to support their learning pathway on their learning journey”. 

Design

Within the lived experiences of over half of the participants (Andromeda, Aquila, Izar, Lyra, Orion, Polaris, Rigel, Sabik) the design of their courses with OEPr in mind became an opportunity to co-create learning materials and activities with their students. It was less about the digital tools or educational technologies selected and more about the pedagogical practices. For example, Merak mentioned “it's not about the tools anymore, or how to set up your classroom online, or how to make videos or interesting content, it's just going to be about the pedagogy that drives those choices”. Further to this, Merak noted “I will share with my students some of the decision making behind certain choices, which I think also allows us to have these conversations” about course designs. Andromeda also mentioned that “I've done aspects of this by having a more fulsome conversation about course objectives, like what do we hope to get out of this course? Right? Because we're really having more of a conversation with students about co-construction.” Making choice explicit within the design of courses and lessons was one of the many essential tenets of OEPr shared by the participants. 

Agency and Ownership

Making explicit choices about agency and ownership was reflected in the participants’ lived experiences when selecting open tools, resources and processes. Agency with technology and ownership of the resulting content was an OEPr consideration. For example, Rigel followed a self-imposed guideline to “not become platform dependent”. Rigel reflected: 

… my solution has been to be as much tech agnostic as possible, get to the core principles of the pedagogy. Like I love technology, but I also recognize the dangers inherent with the people in control of many of them. So, we have to sort of strike a balance. So, I’ve always been more on the side of open source. Even that is not a silver bullet, because that gets bought out, you know, or are not institutionally supported (Rigel).

For Lyra their agency focused on the learners and the participatory nature of their OEPr:

… so, learner centered to me is agency and voice, because that starts from a deeply held belief that, you know, students come at any age, they come with many lived experiences and social connections and, you know, experiences in the world that they draw upon, no matter what the learning task is. I may know more about a particular part of that task, and therefore, I'm providing some of the boundaries. But I always want to keep those flexible as well, you know, so I think flexible boundaries would be how I would describe a lot of my practice (Lyra).

Flexibility was also mentioned in the lived experiences of Aquila and Izar. For Izar this

… comes into teaching in all kinds of different ways. But I'm also very careful not to push people out there. It's really a personal choice, how you want to engage or how much you want to contribute. So, we do focus on it as a resource, and a community to join and contribute to, but that may come later, for some of them (Izar). 

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