Category: blog

In a previous post, I highlighted the distinct focus on OER co-creation with students at Muhlenberg. Students have been drivers of digital learning since we began in 2015, and one of the guiding principles of our digital learning work at Muhlenberg is the value of student voice and agency. In this, we connect to a longstanding focus on peer partnership at the College, where student Digital Learning Assistants join up with Writing Assistants, Peer Tutors, and Learning Assistants, to create a strong presence of students as teachers and pedagogical partners in our teaching and learning environment. This was the focus of a 2018 workshop series, “Engaging Students as Partners,” led by Alison Cook-Sather, director of the Teaching and Learning Institute
at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, along with her student collaborators, Melanie Bahti and Sasha Mathrani. In one of those workshops, Tineke D’Haeseleer, Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg, began to consider possibilities for student-teacher co-creation in her pedagogy. This post is dedicated to the creative and often daring digital pedagogy that Professor D’Haeseleer has evolved, focusing in particular on the OER co-authored by students in her Spring 2018 course, China’s Magical Creatures.

https://open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/

The book’s opening begins with the opening of another book, Story of the Stone (or Dream of Red Chambers, Honglou meng in Chinese):

“Gentle Reader,

What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?

Though the answer to this question may at first seem to border on the absurd, reflection will show that there is a good deal more to it than meets the eye.” ^[1]

It is a perfect path into this open text, as Professor D’Haesesleer explains at the end of her introduction:

The magical Stone in the eponymous Story of the Stone was incarnated into the world of humans as a man who lived a full life, before it returned to its existence as a stone in a different plane of existence – but bearing an inscription detailing its adventures. Like the Stone, this textbook is now ready to go out into the world of humans, and hopefully its adventures will also be inscribed in the object itself, as future readers use, reuse, and remix the text.

Not only does Professor D’Haeseleer situate the co-created OER in relation to an important literary text, she alsos invites readers to reflect on what it means for students to situate themselves, and be situated pedagogically, as, co-creators of knowledge:

What meets the eye at first is a set of chapters written by the students who took the course in Spring 2019. The students are not experts at China, they do not know Chinese and thus had to rely on English-language materials available to them through our library and my personal collection. Many are at the start of their journey of learning to write for their college-level peers.

It may seem absurd to let these people write a textbook: shouldn’t we leave that to the experts? But although I know more than my students about Chinese history, and a bit more than they do about its magical creatures, I am not an expert at textbooks: I use them only for some courses, and I haven’t used one as a student would in many, many years. But I teach students who use textbooks all the time, and I thought they would have better ideas about what makes a textbook on the one hand attractive and inviting, or on the other hand abstruse, or otherwise becomes a roadblock to learning and discovery.

At the outset, readers encounter students giving voice to the process, practice, and purpose of the OER work, including the following perspectives:

Nyjah: I feel this online book is a great idea … “Chinese Magical Creatures” is such an odd class, there is not real material for it. Having people in the class help to put it together makes it even better, because as students we know what we like and dislike in textbooks, and we know what we feel was necessary and important to include.

Lauren: In all of my other classes, I have always felt like I gained a lot of knowledge, and then had nowhere to put it all.

Jess: Being part of the project instilled me with a sense of responsibility. I needed to be clear and accurate.

As a co-created production, the book encompasses so many diverse topics, including the meanings of a ceramic bowl, creatures that lay within the mountains, the origin of dragons, Taoists exorcism rituals, and many other topics carefully researched, documented, and presented by students for their readers. Their bibliographies for each entry are extensive and invite further, deep exploration into the history of the artifacts and stories they are researching, demonstrating engagement with historical methods and also the affordances of open publishing to open and link to connected content and material.

Professor D’Haeseleer is building on this experience this semester, with another co-creative open educational project underway in her course on Korean history. It is one of many critical and creative ways she is practicing digital and open pedagogies at Muhlenberg. She shares reflections on a lot of this work on Twitter @tinebeest. Follow along! These collaborations have been so rewarding and generative for the Digital Learning Team in the last few years.

As OpenEd Week continues, it’s clear that one week is not time enough to spotlight and recognize all of the energies and efforts directed towards opening education at Muhlenberg, in relation to open educational resources and open educational practices more broadly. Today, we’re recognizing the momentum in a department, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, where the introduction of OERs across multiple courses connects up to a larger department commitment to foster open pedagogies.

In 2016, the Digital Learning Team at Muhlenberg began offering workshops to faculty and staff to raise awareness about open educational resources and the possibilities of this work at Muhlenberg, This included Tech Talks (one of the earliest opened Tech Talks: https://muhlenbergcollege.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=6f9132c8-c826-475e-a034-acea003e3ccb&start=7.835123 ) and a campus visit from Robin DeRosa who led a seminar and workshop for faculty and staff (archived here: https://muhlenbergcollege.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=3c8b9c57-4830-4816-8354-acea003e3cb3&start=145.642921 ). In that early moment of the work, it was two professors of Italian who first approached us with an interest in creating their own digital textbook to align with their liberal arts pedagogical practice in a way that no commercial textbook was able to do. In supporting the efforts of Daniela Viale, Lecturer in Italian and French, and Dan Leisawitz, Associate Professor of Italian and director of Italian Studies, we have had opportunity to discover so much that informs our approach to collaboration and partnership with faculty interested in OER, as well as an approach that recognizes the transformative experiences of students who contribute their insights to OER development and iteration.

Buongiorno!

Welcome to Spunti: Italiano elementare 1 – a unique program authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College that takes the place of a traditional language textbook.  Spunti is a fully designed course available to all college instructor of Italian for use and adaptation…

…Spunti is a work in progress, and we would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions, and adaptations that anyone can give us.  Our hope for Spunti is that it can benefit from the input of Italian instructors and students from around the world.

A strong foundation of knowledge and experience has been critical to growing department-wide thinking about the value of open educational resources and practices. Alongside the development of OERs in Italian, French professor Eileen McEwan has developed and published her text, Paris à travers les pages, another example of OER co-creation with students, so well suited to the pedagogical context at Muhlenberg:

Paris through the Pages is the culminating project for an advanced level undergraduate French course that explores the images of Paris in literary works from the 17th to 20th centuries. As an open source book, it is intended to be re-used, revised, and repurposed by undergraduate students and academics in French studies.

In our current pedagogical learning community on open education this semester, no department is more strongly represented than Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, where open educational initiatives exist and are expanding in Italian, German, French, and Spanish. Together, they are helping to radically expand access, equity, and engagement in foreign language study at Muhlenberg, a general academic requirement for all students at the College. Their work to create and integrate more OERs contributes importantly to the wider College commitment to foster inclusive pedagogies.

Here are links to some of the OERs created in Pressbooks by faculty in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures:

This year, International Women’s Day falls within Open Education Week–an ideal time to highlight an OER focused on women and politics created by Professor Lanethea Mathews-Schultz and her students. In Spring 2019, Professor Mathews-Schultz taught a special topics course called 2018: The Political Year of the Woman, focusing on the record number of women elected to Congress the previous year. Students in the course collective researched and co-authored an OER book, 2018 Political Year of the Woman Election: A Critical Examination.

In the introduction, Professor Mathews-Schultz and student co-author Alison Cummins write:

This collection of papers, authored by undergraduate students at Muhlenberg College in the Spring of 2019, considers how women’s electoral successes and challenges in 2018 are both cause and consequence of the increased saliency of gender and of women’s and gender-related issues in electoral politics. Collectively, the authors include students in the sophomore through senior year and represent a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, with majors ranging from political science to English to psychology to media and communication. Our diversity made this project an especially rewarding one. We offer this research, not as experts, but rather in the spirit of open inquiry, scholarly dialogue, and moving the conversation forward. We view our work as very much “in progress,” and with that in mind, we welcome feedback and dialogue…

This class project, an example of open pedagogy in practice, illustrates the possibilities for supporting students’ development as authors and knowledge-creators, as well as their awareness of scholarship as a collaborative act. It is an early example of the way faculty at Muhlenberg are integrating OER co-creation in their courses, a practice that distinguishes much of the open educational work on campus, to be highlighted throughout this week.