Ceding authority is an active endeavor. Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education." The pedagogical value in openness is that it can create dialogue by increasing access and bringing together at once disparate learning spaces. A presentation at OpenEd 2014 by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris

1. If Freire Made a MOOC:
Open Education and Critical Digital Pedagogy
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2. Jesse Stommel
@Jessifer
Sean Michael Morris
@slamteacher
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3. “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Oppressed
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4. Education has misrepresented itself as objective, quantifiable, apolitical.
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5. Critical Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning
predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (implicitly
and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures).The “critical”
in critical pedagogy functions in several registers:
1. Critical, as in mission-critical, essential;
2. Critical, as in literary criticism and critique, providing definitions and
interpretation;
3. Critical, as in a reflective and nuanced approach to a thing;
4. Critical, as in criticizing institutional or corporate impediments to learning;
5. Critical Pedagogy, as a disciplinary approach, which inflects (and is inflected
by) each of these other meanings.
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6. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the banking
model, in which education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the
students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”
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7. In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-posing
education,” in which a classroom or learning environment becomes a
space for asking questions -- a space of cognition not information.
Vertical (or hierarchical) relationships give way to more playful ones.
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8. Can the necessary reflective dialogue flourish within web-based tools,
within social media platforms, within learning management systems,
within MOOCs?
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9. A Critical Digital Pedagogy demands that open and networked
educational environments must not be merely repositories of content.
They must be platforms for engaging students and teachers as full agents
of their own learning.
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10. Critical Digital Pedagogy:
1. centers its practice on community and collaboration;
2. must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires
invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration
happen across cultural and political boundaries;
3. will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a
cacophony of voices;
4. must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.
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11. “[The] variety of responses to MOOCs is indicative of the fault lines
becoming increasingly visible in the terrain of contemporary higher
education [...] Even if few of the largest MOOCs are currently designed
to resemble Trojan horses for participatory culture, they nonetheless
have the potential to expose large sectors of society to new literacies
and meta-level processing around the idea of learning as a
communicative practice.”
~ Bonnie Stewart, “Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation?”
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12. Most efforts to realize the MOOC in any practical sense first begin by
divesting themselves of true openness, instead inventing a partial
openness, or a strategically reframed idea of “open” that can yet include
enough of the banking model of education to keep instructors,
institutions, and also students anchored, fixed.
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13. In order to understand the MOOC as a site of resistance, we must be
ready to embrace its inherent value, even in its misapplication.
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14. “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in
the academy”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
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15. The public imagination around the massive open online course has
faded, become niche.
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16. The MOOC was an empty space -- a potential site of resistance --
upon which we might have writ different expectations.
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17. The MOOC is not a thing. It’s a strategy.
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18. “The MOOC is a sociocultural phenomenon.”
~ Rolin Moe and George Veletsianos, #OpenEd 2014 presentation
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19. What is happening, and why Critical Pedagogy and the MOOC are so
mission critical, is not that the edifice of education has lost its value; it’s
that now, unless learners are given agency within those walls, they will
take agency elsewhere.
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20. MOOCs and Critical Pedagogy are not obvious bedfellows.
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21. Open education is no panacea. Hierarchies must be dismantled -- and
that dismantling made into part of the process of education -- if its
potentials are to be realized.
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22. “I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an
existential, concrete imperative.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope
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23. We offer here 6 theses that work to reimagine MOOCs -- and open
education more broadly -- as potential sites of resistance and liberation.
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24. Thesis #1: A course is a conversation, not a static reservoir or
receptacle for content.
“When the C in MOOC feels like ‘community,’ I’m far happier
than when the C feels like ‘course.’”
~ Audrey Watters, “5 Things I’ve Learned from MOOCs about How I Learn”
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25. Thesis #2: Education cannot be compulsory. The work of
learning starts with agency.
This is at the heart of what Freire calls “co-intentional
education,” in which “Teachers and students (leadership and
people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the
task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it
critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.”
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26. Thesis #3: Best practices are snake oil.
Best practices, as they’re conventionally understood, are not
about meeting and working mindfully and collectively with
students, but about keeping us from needing to.
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27. Thesis #4: Outcomes should give way to epiphanies.
Outcomes prepare students to be dull, listless participants in
labor-for-labor’s-sake.
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28. Thesis #5: Learning should not be structured to conform to
assessment mechanisms.
“Assessment tends so much to drive and control teaching.
Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the
assessment structures we work under.”
~ Peter Elbow, “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment”
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29. Thesis #6: In education, we rise and fall together.
We have proceeded under the supposition that there are
accidental pedagogues everywhere, teachers without
classrooms who left the academy but kept their ears and eyes
open for discussions of a new future for higher education.
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30. Photo by flickr user Fio
“Critical reflection is also action.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

31. Photo by flickr user Fio
bit.ly/CritDigPed