Openness as a ‘worldview’ or as a ‘way of being’
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The document summarizes Helen Crump's presentation on conceptualizing the self as an open educational resource. It discusses openness as a way of being and doing, and how a sociomaterial literacies perspective frames textual production as emerging from assemblages of humans, texts, technologies and other materials. It also examines subjectivity and discourse, and how Baradian agential realism views phenomena as ontologically inseparable relations. The emerging themes around open practice are discussed, as well as what it means to be an open researcher.
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Openness as a ‘worldview’ or as a ‘way of being’
- 1. The Self as an Open Educational Resource by Helen Crump GO-GN Seminar, Delft, The Netherlands, 21st & 22nd April, 2018 Open Educational Practice as a ‘worldview’ or as a ‘way of being’ Openness
- 2. Wrong track When asked “what is most likely to knock governments off course?”, British Prime minister Harold Macmillan is alleged to have replied “Events, dear boy, events” and the same is true for PhD proposals.
- 3. SelfOER, the original concept Openness as a ‘worldview’ or as a ‘way of being’ Process and products as OER (relationships and texts) (Koseoglu & Bali, 2016; Bali & Koseoglu, 2016)
- 4. A sociomaterial literacies perspective enables an interrogation, analysis and explanation of material textual practice in terms of assemblages of texts, technologies and participants” (Goodfellow and Lea, 2016, p. 429). Moreover, it allows consideration of not just texts and technologies, but bodies, actions and objects as well (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010). literacies as social practices has focused on the social and not taken into account material aspects of textual production; it has seen right past the associated technologies (Gourlay et al., 2014) Sociomaterial literacies practice Literacies as social practice focuses on the social. It has not taken account of material aspects of textual production; it has seen right past the associated technologies (Gourlay et al., 2014) A sociomaterial literacies perspective enables interrogation, analysis and explanation of material textual practice in terms of human nonhuman assemblages of texts, technologies and participants (Goodfellow and Lea, 2016). Allows consideration of bodies, actions and objects (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010)
- 5. A sociomaterial literacies perspective enables an interrogation, analysis and explanation of material textual practice in terms of assemblages of texts, technologies and participants” (Goodfellow and Lea, 2016, p. 429). Moreover, it allows consideration of not just texts and technologies, but bodies, actions and objects as well (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010). literacies as social practices has focused on the social and not taken into account material aspects of textual production; it has seen right past the associated technologies (Gourlay et al., 2014) Discourse and subjectivity Subjectivity: “what the subject must be, to what condition he is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge” (Foucault, 2000, p. 459). Discourses: “groups of related statements which cohere in some way to produce meanings and effects in the real world” (Carabine, 2001, p.268); create subject positions that individuals can accordingly take up, in effect specifying ways of seeing and being in the world (Hall, 2001).
- 6. Material-discursive practice The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. […] matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other (Barad, 2003, p. 822).
- 7. Meeting the universe halfway: agential realism In Barad’s theory of agential realism phenomena are the ‘ontologically primitive’ relation (Barad, 2003, p. 815). Phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad, 2003, p. 815). Onto-epistemology: ‘knowing in being’ (Barad, 2003, p.829).
- 8. Recap, RQs and methodology Conceptual Framework • Openness as a phenomena, as a material-discursive practice (Barad, 2003; 2007) • Foucauldian concepts of self (subjectivity), discourse, knowledge & power • Agential Realism (Barad, 2003; 2007) Research Questions • How is openness enacted? • How is subjectivity constructed within open practice? • To what ends open practice? Methodology • Interpretive case study (Stake, 1995) • ‘Talk around texts’ interviews, observation & documents • Aggregation, direct interpretation & Foucauldian discourse analysis
- 9. The emerging entanglement of openness • Little OER (Weller, 2010). • Narrow range of discursive resources; complex interplay between meanings of open, sharing and helping • Emerging themes: economy of open; lived experience or practice; value; helping or making a contribution • Network architecture • Contextualisation • Embodiment
- 10. What it means to be an open researcher “There’s another story here. There’s another side to this. Really, as scholars, we should be, we really should be, looking at both sides” (P4). “You receive support; you’re part of a community, part of a movement that seeks to open up access to education and advance social justice” (HC) BUT
- 11. helen.crump@open.ac.uk @crumphelen helencrump.net Thank you Images: unsplash.com References: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IUBhVGZfvTO6RmlMZhoLSwqv6kxWw11dh4VmAurYugQ/edit?usp=sharing
Editor's Notes
- So, what is self_OER? Self_OER is a very recent conception. In 2016 Koseoglu & Bali proposed that understanding of open educational resources (oer) should be widened from one that primarily regards oer as openly licensed content such as books and open courses to include individuals in the learning community. That is, to see individuals, or their practice, as open educational resources. They contend that many individuals hold openness as a worldview or are open as a way of being and that this is manifested in their practice. Openness is a common philosophy with historical origins that values concepts such as sharing, collaboration, participation, equal access and the democratisation of knowledge as well as sometimes being seen as a vehicle to advance wider issues of social justice. As a worldview, or as a way of being, it means that openness provides a model or underpinning framework through which individuals interpret and interact with the world. it’s thought that an individual, or the self, and their practice can become an oer via the ‘process & products’ of open scholarship. essentially, this is the connections, or relationships, that are formed & the texts that are produced. self_OER as a sociomaterial literacies practice What attracted me to the concept of selfOER was that it seemed to be a great example of a sociomaterial assemblage; that is, it combines a human actor (the self) with non-human actors (texts and networked technology etc.). I’m interested in this because literacies studies are starting to see the production of texts not just as a social practice but as a sociomaterial practice (Goodfellow and Lea, 2016; Gourlay and Oliver, 2013), and the concept of self-OER that Koseoglu and Bali advance foregrounds textual practice as the way in which the self might become an OER. It is important to note that in posthumanist sociomaterial theories human and non-human actors are considered equally, with neither being given precedent.
- Discourse and materiality Moving on and reviewing the literature on open education, I was interested to read the critiques that viewed the open education movement as under theorised, and as largely naive and/or utopian. I was especially taken with Jeremy Knox’s critique that called for open education to engage with a Foucauldian conception of the subject, or self, following the work of Michel Foucault. This caught my attention because in my MRes year I’d conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis on the practice of Working Out Loud, which has similarities with the concept of self-OER that Koseoglu & Bali propose. So I started to think about Foucault’s notion of discourse, and the role that this plays in constructing the subject together with his ideas about knowledge and power. Discourses, according to Foucault, are sets of statements that regulate what can be said and done. They create subjects and objects, along with subject positions for individuals to take up. Discourses, and their subject positions, help create an individual’s subjectivity. Subjectivity is different to identity. It’s about how individuals are ‘subjected’ to outside forces such as economics, the law, society, the circumstances of history and the physical world in general, and consequently how they’re made subjects of these forces. Building on Foucault's concept of discourse, Barad (2007) contends that for discourse to exist it has to be materialised in someway or another in practice. That is, discourse does not exist as a separate entity away from its appearance in material form. For example, whether spoken speech, written email, or video, discourse does not pre-exist its specific material production as speech, email or video. Moreover, materiality is inherently discursive because it embodies human concepts. You cannot have one without the other. Based on insights from quantum physics (that’s right, from quantum physics), Barad sees discourse and materiality as mutually entangled and constitutive of reality. That is, reality is enacted through material-discursive practices. Such a theory is one of performativity. It rejects the idea of representationalism, that there is a separation between the knower and what is known, and that the world out there is somehow mediated through language. To recap, then, my study frames self-OER as a material-discursive practice. It then asks how is self-OER enacted? Which requires detailed description of practice and the relationship between the discourse of open its digital materialisation. How is subjectivity constructed within self-OER? And to what ends is self-OER? I mean, does the practice advance the goals of open education or is it constructed so that it works in some other way? My research is an interpretive case study and my analysis is inductive, so my questions are somewhat ‘provisional’. It’s a case of ‘let’s see what emerges from the data’.
- With it’s focus on the entanglement of the material and the discursive, or rather meaning and matter, such an investigation is underpinned by Barad’s (2007) theory of Agential Realism and its acknowledgment of quantum entanglement and the ontological inseparability that this entails. Two key concepts in this are apparatus and phenomena. In her theory, Barad draws on physicist Niels Bohr’s experiments that show that light exists in the form of particles or waves depending on the apparatus of measurement. For Barad, it follows that relata, related things, do not exist prior to the relation but are only configured by and in the relationship, which is constituted through an apparatus of measurement. Here Barad, reads material-discursive practices as a form of apparatus. Moreover, reality through the entanglement of meaning and matter is produced in practice within specific phenomena. Phenomena, rather than a bounded object, or a ‘thing’ such as an individual, are now regarded as the primary ontological unit. And phenomena are produced by a process that Barad calls ‘agential intra-action’ (more physics). Taking this seriously means that instead of focusing on separate entities or agencies with inherent boundaries and properties such as subject/object, human/non-human, it means that there is no individual self plus texts and technology. Rather, openness, or self-OER, is a single phenomena enacted in practice. Such a view helps facilitate discussion and analysis on questions such as how does the self become an open educational resource and how might practice be seen as a resource, questions that were the cause of considerable reflection in the early stages of this study. Agential realism is a relational ontology that collapses epistemology into ontology to become ‘knowing in being’. It dissolves the traditional philosophical divide between socio-constructivism and realism as well.
- In data collection, The concept of SelfOER was used as a device to explore open educational practice and the relationship with open educational resources. In ‘talk around texts’ interviews I asked participants to present a selection of texts that they felt represents their open practice and the extent to which it does, or does not, constitute an example of self_OER. Using Skype, I conducted and reordered 11 such interviews. On transcribing the data I undertook a preliminary grounded analysis. The themes that emerged are: the economy of open -economic conditions texts produced in; precariaty as motivation to be open lived experience/practice/voice - embodied digital architecture or text curation/value adding to resources sharing/helping/volunteering/making a contribution/being a good citizen or responsible professional tension/struggle openness and criticality Although it’s early days and I have to fully analyse the themes as well as the discourse, I’d just like to offer a small insight into my thoughts so far. It revolves around the relationship between sharing, adding value and labour. Open practices are centred on sharing. Indeed, education is now conceived of by some as synonymous with sharing. Here, I’m specifically thinking of the work of David Wiley, a prominent figure in relation to Open Education and Open Educational Resources. In this context, the idea of sharing is not concerned with matters of monetary exchange, and even when matters of monetary exchange are considered in relation to open education, it is quite often in relation to the cost of producing textbooks and the benefits afforded by digital production (Wiley and Green, 2012). As a discursive resource within this context, sharing works to inhibit connection to matters that relate to the financial economy or indeed the labour conditions in which the things to be shared are created. Therefore, could it be that within the discourse relating to open educational practices the individual is blinded to/ unable to see or removed from monetary considerations within the practice and how value is being created and for who. The discourse surrounding selfOER, or open practice, fuses, or entangles, ‘intrinsic’ aspects of the individual that resonate with ‘being open’ or the philosophy of open and the search for personal meaning plus the social impulse, or social responsibility, to share, to help, to volunteer and the idea of making a contribution with the desire to bring about the democratisation of knowledge, widening participation and agendas of social justice. Moreover, in regard to economic aspects relative to selfOER, or open educational practices, there are a number of rationalities at play: precarious working conditions and the value of networked visibility for ongoing employment prospects; network effects to develop reputation in the prestige economy and/or leverage some other indeterminate benefit through sharing in networks. I am intrigued to discover more about how the material-discursive construction works between the social impulse, or social responsibility, and economic considerations within open educational practice (OEP), or selfOER.
- In data collection, The concept of SelfOER was used as a device to explore open educational practice and the relationship with open educational resources. In ‘talk around texts’ interviews I asked participants to present a selection of texts that they felt represents their open practice and the extent to which it does, or does not, constitute an example of self_OER. Using Skype, I conducted and reordered 11 such interviews. On transcribing the data I undertook a preliminary grounded analysis. The themes that emerged are: the economy of open -economic conditions texts produced in; precariaty as motivation to be open lived experience/practice/voice - embodied digital architecture or text curation/value adding to resources sharing/helping/volunteering/making a contribution/being a good citizen or responsible professional tension/struggle openness and criticality Although it’s early days and I have to fully analyse the themes as well as the discourse, I’d just like to offer a small insight into my thoughts so far. It revolves around the relationship between sharing, adding value and labour. Open practices are centred on sharing. Indeed, education is now conceived of by some as synonymous with sharing. Here, I’m specifically thinking of the work of David Wiley, a prominent figure in relation to Open Education and Open Educational Resources. In this context, the idea of sharing is not concerned with matters of monetary exchange, and even when matters of monetary exchange are considered in relation to open education, it is quite often in relation to the cost of producing textbooks and the benefits afforded by digital production (Wiley and Green, 2012). As a discursive resource within this context, sharing works to inhibit connection to matters that relate to the financial economy or indeed the labour conditions in which the things to be shared are created. Therefore, could it be that within the discourse relating to open educational practices the individual is blinded to/ unable to see or removed from monetary considerations within the practice and how value is being created and for who. The discourse surrounding selfOER, or open practice, fuses, or entangles, ‘intrinsic’ aspects of the individual that resonate with ‘being open’ or the philosophy of open and the search for personal meaning plus the social impulse, or social responsibility, to share, to help, to volunteer and the idea of making a contribution with the desire to bring about the democratisation of knowledge, widening participation and agendas of social justice. Moreover, in regard to economic aspects relative to selfOER, or open educational practices, there are a number of rationalities at play: precarious working conditions and the value of networked visibility for ongoing employment prospects; network effects to develop reputation in the prestige economy and/or leverage some other indeterminate benefit through sharing in networks. I am intrigued to discover more about how the material-discursive construction works between the social impulse, or social responsibility, and economic considerations within open educational practice (OEP), or selfOER.