I was invited to present at a webinar with other UNESCO chairs on the ‘Future of open education’, hosted by the UNESCO chair for Social Sustainability, University of SZcZecin, Warsaw, Poland (17 May 2023).
1. Open education and social
justice: Future imperatives
By
Glenda Cox, University of Cape Town
Future of Open Education, 17 May 2023
By Maria Picasso i Piquer for Creative Commons
2. Open is based on the philosophical view of
“knowledge as a collective social product and the desirability of
making it a social property”
(Prasad & Ambedkar in Downes, 2007:1)
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
2
4. The world in crisis
• Climate change
• Uncertain futures (pandemics, war,
refugees)
• Continued unacceptable inequalities
5. Academic freedom on the decline
(0 Low-1 High)
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Institute of Political Science (FAUIPS, Erlangen-
Nuremberg), Germany, and the V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Countries on the decline are India, China, Britain,
Mexico and United States
6. Futures of Higher Education: A
new social contract
(UNESCO,2021)
This new social contract calls for:
• radically different approach to higher education with a focus
on openness, inclusivity and diversity.
• moving away from neoliberal competition towards higher
education as a public and common good.
• rethinking of existing pedagogy
• continuing but also moving forward from the intergenerational
relationship between lecturers and students to
‘intragenerational’ pedagogy where the presence of students
are foregrounded, building a truly inclusive democratic higher
education where students feel a sense of belonging.
7. UNESCO OER
recommendation
(2019)
The Recommendation is structured
around five actions areas
1. Building capacity of stakeholders to
create, access, re-use, adapt and
redistribute OER
2. Developing supportive policy
3. Encouraging effective, inclusive and
equitable access to quality OER
4. Nurturing the creation of sustainability
models for OER
5. Promoting and reinforcing
international cooperation
9. Social Justice as a framework to understand
the potential of Open Education
At the heart of the open educational
resource movement is the intention
to provide affordable access to
culturally relevant education to all.
This imperative could be described as
a desire to provide education in a
manner consistent with social justice
“
”
Hodgkinson-Williams, C.A. & Trotter, H. (2018).
10. What is Social Justice?
Social justice is a concept that
requires the organisation of
social arrangements that make it
possible for everyone to
participate equally in society.
Nancy Fraser (2005) considers
social justice as ‘participatory
parity’ economically, culturally
and politically.
“
”
11. Economic Dimension
● Material resources
● Maldistribution and
redistribution
Political Dimension
● Political voice
● Mis/representation
mis/framing
Social Justice as participatory parity (Fraser)
Cultural Dimension
● Cultural attributes
● Misrecognition and
recognition
> Participatory parity looks at the what, who and how of social justice
> Justice in each dimension can be remedied through affirmative or
transformative responses.
12. Overcoming injustices:
Affirmative or
transformative
Fraser identifies two types of
strategies to overcome injustice:
affirmative strategies, which include
activities aimed at ameliorating the
scope or intensity of a particular
injustice; and transformative
strategies, which seek to address
the root cause of an injustice.
14. Disclaimer
Initiated as a three-year (2018–2021) research, advocacy and implementation project funded by the Canadian
IDRC, following in wake of Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) and other CILT
open education initiatives (since 2007). Now an institutionally funded initiative.
Glenda Cox, PI, Michelle Willmers, Publishing & Implementation Manager, Bianca Masuku,
Researcher
Digital open textbooks for Development (DOT4D)
15. Social
Justice
Open
Education
Eg: Open
Textbooks
● Open licences
● Localisation
● Voices of
collaborators
and students
● Free
● Digital affordance:adaptability
● Co-creation
● Economic ‘distribution’
● Cultural ‘recognition’
● Political ‘representation’
17. Student co-creation of open textbooks (UCT
case study)
Authors found ways in which to not only capture “persons’ own embodied
experience and their lived realities" in the authorship process, but also to
include their feedback in quality assurance.
Student participation is a critical aspect of the institutional
transformation agenda, in that it addresses social justice and inequity in
the classroom.
18. 'Students as partners' and co-creators
Global movement to include (UG) students in course design, facilitation and research
“a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to
contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical
conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis” (Cook-Sather,
Bovill & Felten, 2014)
Principles: respect, reciprocity and shared responsibility
More recently: attempts to think about power differentials
“Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership”
De Bie et al (2021)
19. Does open education address underlying structures of
dominance and subordination? (transformative justice)
Only if it is created and used across the institution and potentially across the
country and globally, in order to embrace critical reflexivity and pluralism valuing
previously excluded knowledge and legitimising indigenous resources. (Individual
agency to a distributed response)
Only then will we be “dismantling (of) institutional obstacles” or root causes of
systemic injustice that underlie the pursuit of participatory parity present in higher
education (Fraser,2005).
20. A call to organise Open education…
Emphasis in market
value of HE
Technological
monopolies
(Technology is
never neutral)
Perpetuating
injustices
Racism
Economic exclusion
Competition for
gain
Equity
Access
Intersectionality
Collaboration
Community
Voice
Generosity
Care
Empirical evidence for open
education and its role in
affirmative and transformative
justice
Knowledge for the Public good
Norm creation
Distributed response moving
beyond individual agency
Student co-creation
Student success
Agency to communities
‘The power of
publication for all’
Creative Commons
21. "Higher education needs to be
a fierce advocate for free and
open access to knowledge and
science"
(UNESCO, 2021:75)
By Preeti Singh for Creative Commons
22. References
Cox, G., Masuku, B.,& Willmers M (2022a) Sustainable open textbook models for social justice. Front. Educ. 7:881998. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.881998
DOT4D. 2021. Open Textbooks in South African Higher Education: Action Brief. Cape Town: Digital Open Textbooks for Development. Available at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BFNLHPRcPP1f94GyR9EiZ98HKKu54f1/view?usp=sharing
Cox, G., Masuku, B. & Willmers, M. 2020. Open Textbooks and Social Justice: Open Educational Practices to Address Economic, Cultural and Political
Injustice at the University of Cape Town. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1 (2):pp. 1–10. Available at:
https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/31887
Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. New Left Review, 36, 69–88. Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/II/36/nancy-fraser-
reframing-justice-in-a-globalizing-world
UNESCO. 2021 Reimagining our futures together: a new social construct. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707
UNESCO. 2019. OER recommendations https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-open-educational-resources-oer
Savarimuthu, B & Cranefield, S. 2011 Norm creation, spreading and emergence: A survey of simulation models of norms in multi-agent systems. Semantic
Scholar https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Norm-creation%2C-spreading-and-emergence%3A-A-survey-of-Savarimuthu-
Cranefield/a7072328d1a090b145cb065e6312b0f8a3b01273
https://projectnile.in/2021/04/29/crowdfunding-for-social-justice/ from website
Decline in academic freedom. https://www.fau.eu/2022/03/03/news/research/academic-
freedom-on-the-decline/
Editor's Notes
5-7 minutes
Open education is based on the philosophical view that Knowledge should be available to all”
UNESCO (2019). "Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER)". portal.unesco.org. Retrieved 2021-07-06.
UNESCO member states will be reporting on their progress with the implementation of the Recommendation action areas on a periodic basis (every 3–5 years). Launched in 2020 by UNESCO, The OER Dynamic Coalition (comprising stakeholders from member states and National Commissions for UNESCO, IOs, civil society and private sector) was constituted to support and advance implementation of the 2019 Recommendation on OER
Reference: https://plus.google.com/+UNESCO (2020-04-14). "OER Dynamic Coalition". UNESCO. Retrieved 2021-07-08.
Hodgkinson-Williams, C.A. & Trotter, H. (2018). A social justice framework for understanding open educational resources and practices in the Global South, Journal of Learning for Development. Journal of Learning For Development, 5(3), 204-224. Retrieved from http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/312
Hodgkinson-Williams, C.A. & Trotter, H. (2018). A social justice framework for understanding open educational resources and practices in the Global South, Journal of Learning for Development. Journal of Learning For Development, 5(3), 204-224. Retrieved from http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/312
Nancy Fraser wears a number of hats, so to speak; she is a feminist scholar, a moral philosopher, a political and social theorist, whose work over the past three decades has been central to debates over what constitutes a socially just society.
She is particularly well known for her three-dimensional framework of PP (her “greatest contribution” (Blackmore 2017))
Fraser equates participatory parity with social justice: PP is the ability to participate as equals or peers in social interaction. Social and institutional arrangements can either enable or constrain participatory parity from three dimensions:
the economic which relates to the distribution, maldistribution and redistribution of material resources
the cultural – relates to the misrecognition and recognition of cultural attributes
and the political – relating to political voice and contains two levels of injustice, misrepresentation and misframing
Participatory parity looks at the what, who and how of social justice
All three dimensions are mutually entwined and reciprocally influence and reinforce each other but none are reducible to the other. Efforts to work towards social justice must thus involve all three of these dimensions – the emphasis will be tactical and strategic. She uses the slogan “No redistribution or recognition without representation” (Fraser, 2008:282) – all three conditions are necessary for participatory parity and none alone is sufficient
Social justice in each one of these dimensions can be viewed from an affirmative or transformative perspective – and I will discuss this a bit more later.
"By affirmative remedies for injustice I mean remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them." (Fraser, 1995, p.82)
"By transformative remedies, in contrast, I mean remedies aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework." (Fraser, 1995, p. 82)
The open textbook has the affordances to serve as a platform or mechanism through which to save money for students to incorporate the voices of collaborators and students and politically challenge the status quo, shift power dynamics and address issues of relevance, decolonising where necessary, and countering existing publishing models
One of the UCT open textbook authors used her open textbook development process to bring in female and black voices in a very direct attempt at shifting existing power dynamics, with the hope that this would empower students to have a voice, contribute to the canon in their field, and realise the “power in publication.” She also expressed how she was using the open textbook as a process through which to change her approach to her course and include “persons’ own embodied experience” and their lived realities.
If we are going to solve the world’s biggest problems, for example, climate change then the knowledge about them must be open. If our aim is to improve education then we need to embrace openness as a mechanism for everyone in the world to have access to quality resources.
I invite you to share your teaching and learning resources (course materials, lecture videos, slides, open textbooks) with open licenses to support students and other lecturers in other institutions that may be less well resourced. Open licenses allow the users of materials to reuse, redistribute, revise, remix and retain. The creation of these materials is a perfect opportunity to include students as partners in the design, authoring and evaluation of your teaching materials