Skip to main content

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. 
 
 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Professional Practice Dissertation Pre-Proposal, Part 1 of 4

My dissertation proposal as a culture-based education (CBE) version of Chopped All-Stars Please indulge my need for metaphors and analogies to make sense of my world. This is Part 1 of  4 blog posts to clarify my thinking on my proposed dissertation topic.  How will this study work? Gather strong chefs, leaders and innovators in their own right and challenge them to create synergistic culinary masterpieces in the CBE Project,  a professional development program. change chef to teacher; change culinary masterpieces to culture-based education-infused practices and curriculum )  The parameters:  time (Kamehameha Hawaiʻi 4-week course with deadlines for teachers' own action research and learning portfolio to follow) key ingredients ( CBE practices , moenahā framework, makawalu ,  and the   National Writing Project program model) the course (teachers' own content area and current curriculum) The question: How doe...
6 comments
Read more

Dissertation Proposal 4 of 4: Timeline

Timeline Summer 12 - pre-proposal, lit reviews, submission for B-credit, negotiations for a course (place, time) Fall 12 - build the course using the village, build in  indigenous, developmental evaluation and sustainability Spring 13 - submit IRB approvals, pa ʻa the logic model, recruit teacher leaders Summer 13 - Alana Summer Institute Fall 13 - teacher action research and gathering of data Spring 14 - analyze data, write Summer 14 - write, collaborate, present This is a "in an ideal world" timeline that does not take into account the village, the permissions from higher ups, the ability to exist on a non-budget, the recruitment of teachers willing to participate in this work with me, the full time job duties that I already have AND the fact that Iʻm supposed to be in 6 or 9 credits worth of my own courses in the Summer of 13 on Oahu when I want to serve my Big Island teachers. Any suggestions?
3 comments
Read more

South Africa bound

I am not, by nature, a cocktail party person. I am introverted, more comfortable on the sidelines, and I do not, like engaging in small talk. Writing Project leaders, though, by nature are outgoing, friendly people persons. What do Writing Project people schedule for their first activity at a new site director's conference? A cocktail party of course. An introverts strategy at a cocktail party is to stick close to the person you came with, and if you find yourself separated, then find one person you connect with and stick to them. That's how I met Cheryl Canada Logan, director for the mid Ohio writing project. Something just clicked with us. She was just back from Jamaica, having worked with teachers there. I talked about my interest in culture-based education and we hit it off. Who knew that the encounter at a cocktail party in Arizona would turn into an opportunity to join Cheryl in South Africa two years later, but that's how things seem to happen in life, so I...
2 comments
Read more