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Copyleft as a Radical Act


We are living in new realities. I am caged on a dining room table where Zoom classes and meetings take up so much of my time that I have difficulty being present, sitting down, staying focused. Still, my job is to take this new normal, create a hybrid of synchronous and asynchronous content to engage students in learning through relevant grappling, deep dive discussions and minds on - hands on practice.

The article Open Pedagogy by DeRosa & Jhangiani guides me to the intentional transformation of content to distance education (our new normal).

"Open Pedagogy," as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.

A site of praxis! When the public schools shut down in Hawaiʻi, thus shutting out our over 100 teacher candidates out of their practicums, what we missed most was our site of praxis. The second thing we noticed was that our university serves some of the lowest socioeconomic regions in Hawaiʻi, so when our public schools shut down for learning from home, many of our schools did not have the infrastructure nor the resources to go online. Instead, they opened up their cafeterias for breakfast and lunch pickup and teachers created paper packets. The socioeconomic disparity in our communities are now out in the open for all to see. I hope the powers that be are actually paying attention and looking.

More promise from the article:
This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. 
This idea of dynamic, contested, constantly under revision reminds me of a term one of my mentor uses: copyleft (as opposed to copyright) - it is a way to take what we are practicing and learning and revising about teaching through Hawaiian culture based practices and opening it up, giving freely of our experiments and our findings, thus copyleft. I think that is what open pedagogy is about, and that is a radical act. 
 
 


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