if freire made a mooc: open education and critical digital pedagogy

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If Freire Made a MOOC: Open Education and Critical Digital Pedagogy

https://www.flickr.com/photos/126451798@N05/with/15169531486/

Jesse Stommel@Jessifer

Sean Michael Morris@slamteacher


http://twitter.com/jessifer


“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.”~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Oppressed



Education has misrepresented itself as objective, quantifiable, apolitical.



Critical Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (implicitly and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures).The “critical” in critical pedagogy functions in several registers:

1. Critical, as in mission-critical, essential;2. Critical, as in literary criticism and critique, providing definitions and

interpretation; 3. Critical, as in a reflective and nuanced approach to a thing;4. Critical, as in criticizing institutional or corporate impediments to learning;5. Critical Pedagogy, as a disciplinary approach, which inflects (and is inflected

by) each of these other meanings.


http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/10-things-learned-from-making-a-meta-mooc/


In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the banking model, in which education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”



In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-posing education,” in which a classroom or learning environment becomes a space for asking questions -- a space of cognition not information. Vertical (or hierarchical) relationships give way to more playful ones.



Can the necessary reflective dialogue flourish within web-based tools, within social media platforms, within learning management systems, within MOOCs?



A Critical Digital Pedagogy demands that open and networked educational environments must not be merely repositories of content. They must be platforms for engaging students and teachers as full agents of their own learning.



Critical Digital Pedagogy:

1. centers its practice on community and collaboration;2. must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires

invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;

3. will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices;

4. must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.


http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/10-things-learned-from-making-a-meta-mooc/


“[The] variety of responses to MOOCs is indicative of the fault lines becoming increasingly visible in the terrain of contemporary higher education [...] Even if few of the largest MOOCs are currently designed to resemble Trojan horses for participatory culture, they nonetheless have the potential to expose large sectors of society to new literacies and meta-level processing around the idea of learning as a communicative practice.”

~ Bonnie Stewart, “Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation?”



Most efforts to realize the MOOC in any practical sense first begin by divesting themselves of true openness, instead inventing a partial openness, or a strategically reframed idea of “open” that can yet include enough of the banking model of education to keep instructors, institutions, and also students anchored, fixed.



In order to understand the MOOC as a site of resistance, we must be ready to embrace its inherent value, even in its misapplication.



“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”

~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress



The public imagination around the massive open online course has faded, become niche.



The MOOC was an empty space -- a potential site of resistance -- upon which we might have writ different expectations.



The MOOC is not a thing. It’s a strategy.



“The MOOC is a sociocultural phenomenon.”~ Rolin Moe and George Veletsianos, #OpenEd 2014 presentation


http://www.apple.com


What is happening, and why Critical Pedagogy and the MOOC are so mission critical, is not that the edifice of education has lost its value; it’s that now, unless learners are given agency within those walls, they will take agency elsewhere.



MOOCs and Critical Pedagogy are not obvious bedfellows.



Open education is no panacea. Hierarchies must be dismantled -- and that dismantling made into part of the process of education -- if its potentials are to be realized.



“I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative.”

~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope



We offer here 6 theses that work to reimagine MOOCs -- and open education more broadly -- as potential sites of resistance and liberation.



Thesis #1: A course is a conversation, not a static reservoir or receptacle for content.


“When the C in MOOC feels like ‘community,’ I’m far happier than when the C feels like ‘course.’”

~ Audrey Watters, “5 Things I’ve Learned from MOOCs about How I Learn”


Thesis #2: Education cannot be compulsory. The work of learning starts with agency.


This is at the heart of what Freire calls “co-intentional education,” in which “Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.”


Thesis #3: Best practices are snake oil.


Best practices, as they’re conventionally understood, are not about meeting and working mindfully and collectively with students, but about keeping us from needing to.


Thesis #4: Outcomes should give way to epiphanies.


Outcomes prepare students to be dull, listless participants in labor-for-labor’s-sake.


Thesis #5: Learning should not be structured to conform to assessment mechanisms.


“Assessment tends so much to drive and control teaching. Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the assessment structures we work under.”

~ Peter Elbow, “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment”


Thesis #6: In education, we rise and fall together.


We have proceeded under the supposition that there are accidental pedagogues everywhere, teachers without classrooms who left the academy but kept their ears and eyes open for discussions of a new future for higher education.



“Critical reflection is also action.”~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed



bit.ly/CritDigPed


http://bit.ly/CritDigPed