The Open Pedagogy Toolkit aims to highlight relevant literature, resources, projects, and research in the area of open pedagogy. This toolkit was developed by a multi-institutional group, The Open Practices Collaborative. Our purpose was to focus on building relationships that support us as we create, share, and collaborate on various projects that support the Open movement. With this focus in mind, we adhered to a set of values to guide our work on this toolkit.  

Group Purpose:

As a multi-institutional group, we are focused on building relationships that support us as we create, share, and collaborate on various projects that support the Open movement.

Values:

In order to ensure the Open movement is a space that continues to be equitable and collaborative, we are committed to:

1. Using the values for open pedagogy and Critical Digital Pedagogy to ground decision-making.
2. Exploring the dynamics of power and identity in collaborative spaces for the Open movement.
3. Making space for care and trust in order to build equitable and authentic relationships.
4. Maintaining a multi-institutional group that includes multiple perspectives and roles.
5. Modeling and advancing these values through communication and transparency

Guided by these values, we created the toolkit in a collaborative space that included opportunities for authentic and vulnerable discussion and decision-making. These values have also served the group when navigating the tension between achieving our goal and maintaining a process that centers care for the people on the project and their personal and professional needs. For example, while working on this Open Pedagogy Toolkit project, we added a step to our work at the end of each academic year. We discussed and collaboratively wrote a reflection of the year that each project member could then use in their professional annual evaluation. This allows the group to have space for reflection and connection while developing a shared story of the project. Each project member is then encouraged to adapt the writing for their own needs based on evaluation requirements of their institution and professional goals. If you are interested in exploring the ideas of care and collaborative work, we invite you to read this post  which provides more examples of how to operationalize care.

This resource is intended as a support for a broad audience that may include faculty in higher education, Libraries faculty and staff, instructional designers, faculty developers, and anyone in education who is interested in contributing to the open movement. While you can choose to read the toolkit chapters in sequential order, depending on your own goals, you can also jump around to the chapters that feel most relevant to you.  Because this toolkit was written by a multi-institutional group, we each bring differences in our voices and experiences to the creative process. We valued the multiple perspectives and roles that each of us brought to this project and it was important for us to maintain our authentic voices.  As a result, chapters or parts of this toolkit may be different in tones and writing styles. We chose to keep these differences because at its core, open pedagogy encourages multiple voices and perspectives.

The story of our group

As a group we felt it was important to provide a clear picture of the labor and process required to publish a complex and highly collaborative open resource like this toolkit. We want to honor the work of not only the current project members, but also those who contributed in earlier stages as well. Throughout the past three years, the collaborators on this project have evolved, but one thing has remained true. The space we have created has allowed us to find a meaningful way to contribute to the open movement as we cultivate community and our own passions. The origins of the group were about creating a space to develop multi-institutional research projects, and over the years the group dynamics, people, and contexts shifted. The timeline below provides the history of our working group:

• Spring 2021: The group focused on creating a research collaborative around Open Education. The goal of this group was to explore how we could work together to conduct cross-institutional research around OER.
• Fall 2021-Spring 2022: The project members continued to evolve.  We continued exploring what our purpose and goals might be. We collaboratively worked on a literature review, developed a model to research faculty and student experiences with Open Pedagogy, and developed sample survey questions.
• Spring 2022 – current: As a group we re-defined our plan and goals to focus on creating an Open Pedagogy toolkit. The previous work on focused  multi-institutional research informed how we were thinking about the role of this toolkit in providing foundational knowledge for researchers.

While the logistics of scheduling and running meetings and creating processes for writing were part of the labor of this group, we were also intentional in discussing power dynamics, individual needs and strengths, institutional context and developing an explicit understanding of the gendered nature of open work (Dai & Carpenter, 2020). We made space to create the toolkit while also learning together from the research and writing that we were doing. This process and space were meaningful, and healing, for many in the group. Through global levels of grief and sadness to personal joys, changes, and crises, we all worked together to create a space where everyone can show up as they are and ask for what they need, while maintaining a commitment to moving the group forward. This is “the work,” and it’s an incredible amount of emotional and mental labor, but it is imperative to reflect on and do this work intentionally if this movement is to continue evolving.

Contributors & Collaborators

The following individuals contributed in the early stages of the project including the formation of our group and the initial planning work that was foundational for the creation of the toolkit:

• Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey
• Lisa Di Valentino
• Kathy Essmiller
• Sara Hutton
• Elaine Kaye
• Lily Todorinova
• Deidre Tyler
• Nicole Wilson

The following individuals created this Open Pedagogy Toolkit:

• Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey, author
• Kathy Essmiller, author
• Mandi Goodsett, author
• Jeanne Hoover, author
• Stacy Katz, author
• Elaine Kaye, editor and author
• Deidre Tyler, author
• Lily Todorinova, author
• Nicole Wilson, editor and author

For more information about the authors, please read our bios.