Open Pedagogy 11/7 Recap: Access Pedagogy

Participants at the 11/7 Open Pedagogy event on Access Pedagogy, gathered around for a roundtable discussion.

Last Thursday, November 7, we met for our second Open Pedagogy event of the semester. Our theme for the evening was Access Pedagogy. Against the backdrop of austerity and persistent budget crises at CUNY, we considered how we could make ourselves accessible as teachers. We asked:  To what extent are our classrooms accessible, and what can we do to center access and equity in both in-person and online teaching?

We began the evening by exploring how our day-to-day experiences in the classroom and with students continually challenge our assumptions about teaching and learning. One participant shared that, as an instructor, they assumed that students would contact them or come to office hours if something weren’t clear. Other participants nodded and laughed in agreement as this same instructor then explained that this was 1) false; 2) untrue of even their own behavior as a student. Many of us admitted that, when we were in college, we were often too shy, intimidated, or busy to go to our professors’ office hours ourselves. The implication? It’s actually our job as instructors to make sure we are being clear and to check-in regularly with our students!

More generally, our students continually and productively challenge our assumptions. At CUNY, many of our students balance careers, caretaking, and college. In many ways, they are expected to be superhuman. As instructors, we learn again and again that our most engaged and creative students may be frequently absent or late for class. We learn again and again that access to basic technology—including a computer and safe and stable internet connection—is not a given. Nor can we take for granted that our students will have had the time and resources to complete all of their coursework. This entails a need for some malleability and ingenuity on our part.

Fortunately, we can work to reduce barriers to student learning; we can work to improve access. At the event, we discussed softening the language in our syllabi, such that policies around punctuality, attendance, and late work submission are made somewhat flexible and always compassionate. We can provide students with laptops and other forms of accessible technology, including by using open and free software and open platforms (like the OpenLab!). We can help our students seek out resources and list these on our OpenLab course/project sites. Moreover, we can do all this while still teaching students the importance of advocating for themselves, and of making their own needs clear to their instructors.

Of course, not all of the problems we face in higher learning today have straightforward solutions. Despite our enthusiasm for open learning platforms like the OpenLab and, especially for Open Educational Resources (OERs), a participant reminded us that we must be careful to not simply replicate the textbook format. Working digitally gives students an opportunity to express themselves not just in formal essays, but in memes, gifs, and blogs. We should not shy away from multimedia, nor from opportunities to make students co-creators of a course. Moreover, while we can all strive to make ourselves more accessible as instructors, we also have to confront the harsh realities of the trauma, racism, and poverty many of our students face, as well as the high workloads and precarity many of our adjunct instructors live with.

Let’s continue the conversation! Please comment on this post with thoughts/ questions.

Pedagogy Profile: Jesse Rice-Evans

Curious about the OpenLab team behind our 24/7 e-mail support, office hours, and workshops? Right now we’re featuring OpenLab Digital Pedagogy Fellows who do these on-the-ground projects as part of our ongoing Retrospective series. Many thanks to past team members who’ve helped the OpenLab thrive, and to current members who keep everything running smoothly!

What is your role on the OpenLab team?

An art deco-style portrait of a white femme with purple hair and dark lipstick wearing a t-shirt with the text "Femmes Against Fascism" and holding a purple cane
Portrait by Michaela Oteri

Since 2018, I’ve been with the team as a Digital Pedagogy Fellow. I do Pedagogy Profiles, organize and facilitate workshops, and work with the Community Team to devise new programming, features for the site, and other ways to reach out to and support the City Tech community! You can usually tell it’s me writing because I use a lot of exclamation points!

Describe your experience using the OpenLab to support your pedagogy.

Since I don’t teach courses here at City Tech, I don’t get to use the OpenLab for my classroom teaching (fingers crossed that will change in the future!), but I’m responsible for a lot of the workshop and event content we offer during the academic year. This means that I’m constantly flipping through new sites for Pedagogy Profile candidates and examples for workshops, and through back-end work like testing plugins, I get to experiment with brand-new functionality and features.

This means that even though some of our workshop topics may sound familiar to long-time users of the OpenLab, we do try our best to provide updated examples of tools we like, assignment ideas, and best practices for using the OpenLab to teach, learn, and connect.

Can you describe the ways you have integrated the OpenLab into your pedagogical practices here at City Tech or elsewhere?

I’m in my third year working on my Ph.D. in English Composition and Rhetoric at the CUNY Graduate Center, and my pedagogy shows up in my academic and poetic writing. I have actually been able to bring a lot of my silly teaching metaphors and informal pedagogy into workshops that I co-facilitate with other OpenLab Fellows! I make a lot of bad jokes about computers, try to include some interactivity into lecture-heavy workshop agendas, and ask attendees to collaborate and share knowledge, much as I do in my writing classrooms.

Student collage of magazine and printed images that focus on the theme of self and other, including an image of Sansa Stark, a makeup ad, and empowering text from glossy publications

Spending time on the OpenLab as a non-teaching community member means I get to build on other folks’ work in my own teaching on the CUNY Academic Commons: using categories to organize student writing on my course sites, setting up my class schedule with Mammoth .docx, or even getting overexcited and activating a bunch of features that I don’t know how to use well can provide a useful space for my students and me to share our difficulties all underscore my pedagogical values: appreciating failure, embracing human error with humor, and staying flexible.

How have the OpenLab and other open digital pedagogy tools transformed or expanded your pedagogy, and the pedagogical values you’re able to realize in your courses and educational practice? 

I’ve actually written about this a bit over at the Graduate Center Teaching and Learning Center blog Visible Pedagogy and on my personal site where I showcase some of my digital projects.

Meme by @hot.crip of block text on an abstract background, reading "how to accommodate people with disabilities: NO ask them whats wrong with them (oops try again) YASSS ask them how you can make an experience safer for them"
Meme by @hot.crip

As we use more and more digital tools in my classrooms, we are inevitably going to face network errors, broken links, and ugly formatting. Through coping with my chronic illnesses, I’ve learned to feel confident sharing my own needs, including technological ones. Remaining a motivated and curious learner is a huge part of why I love working with students especially, as they have so much to teach.

A student response to the film "Her" in the form of a meme and an accompanying textual explanation

One of my favorite OpenLab things is our Open Pedagogy series where staff and faculty come together over snacks to chat informally about a specific topic in teaching and learning, and I’ve found that the ethos of these spaces is comfortable and generative for me as a learner, and I feel confident sharing even things I’ve found difficult in balancing my positionalities as PhD student, fellow, adjunct, and scholar. Inevitably, other folks can relate to some of what I share, while others provide an alternate framing for the topic that helps me reimagine a way to engage with a challenging experience.

Aside from courses, how does the OpenLab support your pedagogical practices and ambitions? (Note: Think broadly about public education initiatives, course coordination, non-academic student support, clubs, and projects, etc.)

Well, I’ve gotten really good at responding to workshop participants’ in-the-moment needs, which builds on my previous career as a waitress. The informal setting of our twice-per-semester Open Pedagogy events is both enriching and comfortable for my style of learning, and I was able to center one of my primary research interests (accessibility) as our OP theme for this year!

I’m also hoping to use Portfolios to showcase some of my CUNY-specific digital and writing projects, though my own exam deadlines inevitably bump this project down!