Speakers: Meggan Houlihan (OSUN/Bard College), Tamara Kamatovic (CEU), Angéla Kóczé (CEU), Kaitlin Lucas (CEU), Pusa Nastase (CEU), S M Mahfuzur Rahman (BRAC University), and Matyas Szabo (CEU).
What does it mean for education to be open? Within the current discourse on “open education”, “openness” has been largely associated with open access to educational resources and open publishing, thus, drawing on the opportunities provided by the Internet and digital technologies. The current workshop seeks to explore the multiple dimensions of openness in their interconnectedness in educational practices. In particular, the workshop will inquire into how turning to the concept of “open society” can be useful to the end of revising and expanding the currently dominant approaches to openness in the context of higher education. The event will specifically focus on the ways this more multifaceted understanding of openness can be translated into educational practices and pedagogical techniques.
The list of questions that the workshop aims to explore includes (but is not limited to):
- What are the consequences of the currently dominant technology-centered approaches to open education (and corresponding understanding of openness) for the envisaged forms and objectives of higher education, including its societal role? What are the relations between its democratizing and exclusionary effects?
- How can open education arrive at a more agency-centered approach instead of the current implicitly passive paradigm in which its participants emerge as “users” rather than co-creators?
- What are the ways of rethinking openness in education in order to augment its emancipatory potential? How should open education address existing power relations and hierarchies in educational institutions and practices?
- What forms of knowledge production and sharing does openness in education imply, and how it can impact the curriculum and organization of the learning process? What are the consequences for disciplinary divides?
- How is open education associated with de-colonization in the learning process and knowledge production?
- How can the notion of open society be translated into the curriculum and what are the implications for pedagogical approaches? How can the development of curriculum and pedagogical practices be reconsidered from the perspective of open education in terms of who and on what terms can take part in these processes?
The workshop will be composed of two panels and a moderated roundtable discussion, which will be open to the audience.
You can join the audience of the workshop in person (Vienna Campus, B-319) or via Zoom by filling in this short form. You can find more information about the workshop on our webpage.