The Open Pedagogy Model

INTRO MUSIC

HOST
Today we explore the concept of Open Pedagogy with Bronwyn Hegarty, Principal Lecturer in Tertiary Teacher Education at Otago Polytechnic, in Dunedin, New Zealand.  Bronwyn specializes in helping educators understand and use Open Educational Resources as part of their teaching practice.
In this podcast, Bronwyn explains her model of Open Pedagogy. The model describes 8 attributes interacting simultaneously to create an atmosphere of learning that Bronwyn calls the OEPosphere.
The 8 attributes consist of: 
Participatory Technologies
People, Openness and Trust
Innovation and Creativity
Connected Communities
Sharing ideas and resources
Learner generated contributions
Reflective practice
And
Peer Review
For a more indepth look at all 8 attributes you will find a link to a previous podcast as well as an illustration of the Open Pedagogy model in the description of this podcast. 
 Due to the interconnected nature of these attributes, Bronwyn describes how the interplay of these 8 elements create an atmosphere of Open Pedagogy – her OEPosphere.


BRONWYN HEGARTY
So, the OEPosphere, that was a word I kind of made up and I see it as a place where teachers empower each other within a participatory culture.which is sort of aligned with Attribute 1. It’s a place also where students are empowered by their teachers, and I’m going to quote from my article: “to take the lead, solve problems, and work collectively to produce artifacts that they share, discuss, reconfigure, and redeploy” and it, it basically is something that becomes quite magical because the students become fully involved in the learning process. For this to happen, for participation to occur in the OEPosphere, teachers and students have to be willing to use open licensing or public domain or creative common and facilitate the 5Rs from David Wiley –  which are retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. If teachers can model this it’s a lot easier for students to understand how it all works. And you will often find that they don’t even think about that, but they do need guidance from their teachers. 
And a OEPosphere um could be where teachers um have encouraged students to use for example Instagram to record what they’re doing with their projects and on Instagram you can put images and video, and you can also put notes, and you can actually start to develop a community of people that are looking at your material and giving you feedback. So, there’s participation happening because you’ve got students creating material. You can also have the teachers creating materials and putting it there. You’ve got people interacting together, they will be reflecting on each other’s work, they are actually not only sharing their resources, they’re also giving each other feedback on those resources and process of Peer Review is happening. So I guess the 8 Attributes of the Open Pedagogy would be operating in an integrated way in an OEPosphere – not all of them at once but they are difficult to separate, and it was quite challenging to do that because quite honestly they overlap, they you know, you can’t have one without the other, because it is a holistic model.


HOST
To arrive at her Open Pedagogy Model, Bronwyn built upon the work of another author, Grainine Conole, and her five principles of openness.  


BRONWYN HEGARTY
What I was trying to do is, she talks about “openness;” I wanted to talk about how that openness can be moved into an Open Pedagogy. So how teachers can align with different attributes that would encourage open educational practices. So, for example, I’ve made Reflective Practice more overt in the model. Facilitation of learner’s contributions to OER; that’s Learner Generated more obvious. And Participatory Technology is something that I consider needed to be stated more clearly, if you like. And it’s a given that if you’ve got open educational practice, you’re going to use participatory technologies, but I just felt that the model made it a little bit clearer for people.
If all of these 8 attributes, if they were working together holistically, would give you open educational practice. So to me it’s more than just openness, there’s a whole lot of other factors that need to be interacting for teachers to be able to offer open education.


HOST
Bronwyn’s Open Pedagogy model was initially published in 2015. While the reaction to the model has been somewhat quiet, David Wiley - creator of the 5 R's of OER was of the opinion that “You should never use “open” as an adjective unless you can clearly describe how the “open” thing differs from the normal thing.”  Bronwyn addresses his response.


BRONWYN HEGARTY
When I first suggested the Open Pedagogy Model, I was on an IT forum and David Wiley responded because it didn’t think it should be called “Open” Pedagogy, because from his view we shouldn’t use “open” as an adjective unless you can clearly describe how the “open” thing differs from the normal thing. He thought that each of the Attributes could occur on its own. But I sort of countered that, in a way, by discussing the whole idea of the fact that they had to be integrated together for a open educational practice. We never resolved it but I’ve written an article about it and I’m not really sure what the response has been to that article. I haven’t had other responses. 


HOST
The growing trend of awareness, support and use of Open Educational Resources contributes to broad educational changes. Bronwyn explains how K-12 teachers can contribute to an atmosphere of open teaching practices in their own classrooms.


BRONWYN HEGARTY
K-12 teachers can contribute. I think the first thing is that they develop   an understand of perhaps open licensing what it means to share their intellectual property. That’s a big step. If you have the support of your organization to use Creative Commons Licensing, for example,  it’s a lot easier for teachers to use open platforms, use social media. You also need to think about your digital skills, and part of developing your digital capability, and I like to call it digital information capability is that you need to build your confidence in this area. And one of the best ways of doing that, believe it or not, is to actually try out lots of different tools, talk to other teachers - find out what they are doing. You know, if somebody says “Aw look, you know, I’m putting all of my images up on Picasa, you know, the students can create series of photographs.” As soon as you tell the teacher that, they see the benefit of it. They find out how it’s being used it’s actually a lot easier for them to understand, you know, how they might use it. It’s about playing with the tools. It’s about making mistakes. It’s about persevering, you know? It’s not going to be easy.
I think Open Pedagogy is a really realistic uh model for K-12 teachers.It doesn’t really matter, uh, what context you’re in, whether it’s higher education or K-12, all the attributes are still applicable. It’s perhaps easier I think at K-12 to be more um innovative. You’ve just got to develop your confidence to do that. 


HOST
Supporters of open practices within all levels of education suggest the need to move from an OER model that emphasizes how to make or share open resources to a dynamic model of Open Educational Practice: a practice that recognizes the philosophy, theories and attitudes that support openness. Because of the nature of K to 12 education, many believe it is an environment where Open Pedagogy could fully flourish.


BRONWYN HEGARTY
I think I’ll go back to that primary school in the North Island in New Zealand, where they’ve actually opened up their school website to the community so they’ve not only developed a school newsletter, they’ve also got students creating e-portfolios and sharing them, I know the students use Wikispaces for that. They also use blogs to develop their writing. And there’s an example of a child talking about - she said “My mom works full time. She doesn’t get to come to class to see what I’m doing very often, you know, but she can be at work and she can look at my blog and she can leave a comment on what I’ve written on the blog. So I feel like she’s actually there with me.
So I think that the potential is there, and these children - I’m not sure if they’re connecting with others around New Zealand, but, you know,  if lots of schools were doing that then that would open up opportunities for schools to connect with each other. And I know there are examples of that happening in New Zealand; where schools are connecting on projects together and sharing what they’re doing. And I think that has the potential. It’s about going wider than the school. It’s going out to other schools in your country. It’s also about going to other schools around the world. 
I think the key thing is to understand that the Open Pedagogy Model is, you know, all the 8 Attributes are integrated, they overlap, you can’t really have one without the other. 


HOST
Special thanks to our guest, Bronwyn Hegarty of Otago Polytechnic for being a part of this podcast series.
We hope you have enjoyed listening to this podcast and will take some time to listen to the first part of our interview with Bronwyn Hegarty where she discusses her 8 attributes of open pedagogy in further detail, and to other podcasts in this series taking a closer look at Open Educational Resources.
This resource was funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources initiative, which is made possible through an investment from the Alberta government.
In keeping with principals of Open Education, this podcast is available under an open license, CC-by-SA.
The music "AM-Trans" and "Cash Rules" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-alike 4.0 International license.



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