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Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education is an open text that represents a starting point towards curating and centring marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education, an attempt at critical pluriversalism. It is a curated collection of 38 blog posts, lectures, talks, articles, and other informal works contributed by 43 diverse authors/co-authors that offer a perspective on open education that can be considered marginal and that challenges the dominant hegemony.
In the introduction to Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education, the editors state:
“Open education agendas are not simply being “openwashed” as has been observed by many; our concern is that that they have become watered down. It is clear that questions about equity and social justice need to be reasserted at this time. It is also a moment to question power relations within broader open education networks…therefore, we are cautious about rhetoric concerning equity, diversity, and inclusion, asserting that these only have meaning when concomitant processes are genuinely embraced to avoid further marginalizing the marginalized. In this book, voices from the margins are made central, voices that ask important questions, such as…
- Is the open education movement even a single movement?
- If so, what binds it together?
- What does it mean for something to be open?
- Who gets to decide what is “open” enough?
- Or for whom it is open? Can one use closed means to achieve open ends?
- …and more.
For this assignment, please choose and read at least one essay/chapter from this text. As you read it, please reflect upon the following questions and add your thoughts below:
- Which chapter did you select? Who wrote it?
- What drew your attention to that specific essay?
- How does the essay critique open education?
- What are your thoughts on the essay or critique?
- How does the critique resonate with your own experiences or practices?
Complete this Activity
After you do this assignment, please share a brief reflection about what you read via a comment below it can appear with other responses. If your response exists at a public viewable URL, you can also add the information directly to this site.
Open at the Margins was edited by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Text cover photo by Michele Caliani on Unsplash