In the 2008 Cape Town Open Education Declaration, signatories envisioned that openness in education would foster a “new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together” (Cape Town, 2008). Today, the global open education community continues to pursue these pedagogical visions. This was captured at a recent gathering of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) member state representatives, who work to encourage international collaborations to improve education, science, and culture. In a series of draft recommendations for open education, they affirmed the ongoing aim to realize pedagogical innovations that engage “both educators and learners to become more active participants in educational processes and creators of content as members of an inclusive knowledge society” (UNESCO, 2018). As we, a librarian and an academic technology consultant, increasingly participated in open education, these pedagogically-focused goals resonated with our professional roles and inclinations. Motivated to more fully explore these possibilities, we set out to expand local dialogue and awareness of open pedagogies. We invited a community of educators together to investigate the pedagogical possibilities of open education and to dwell on questions about learners’ agency and ownership of their education.
In this chapter, we describe our partnership that formed through mutual investment in reshaping approaches to teaching and learning within our local university setting. We provide the theoretical background of the project as well as share the structure, essential elements, and strategies employed to form a series of faculty learning communities focused on open pedagogy.
Open Pedagogy Approaches, edited by Kimberly Davies Hoffman and Alexis Clifton, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Published July, 2020.</p
