Critical Instructional Design and Open Education

Sean Michael Morris, Middlebury CollegeAmy Collier, Middlebury College

Amy Slay, Middlebury Institute of International Studies

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Learning is a liberatory, discursive act of resistance that today takes place within a digital context, and in world mired in issues of social justice.

Best practices distance us from the work we do. Teaching is fundamentally a matter of instinct.

● If a classroom is “open”, does it actively seek to decolonize the space? Does it confront the ways that it is ideologically, rhetorically, textually, socially, or otherwise closed?

● If a classroom is “open”, how does it allow for unplanned learning to occur? How does it provide students access to one another? Or, even more important, does it sustain the polemical relationship between teacher and students?

● What are the assumptions that “open” makes, and how is it yet grounded in teacher authority and not student agency?

● How does Bloom’s Taxonomy delimit student agency? What assumptions does it make about learning and therefore learners that reinforce education as a colonizing rather than a liberatory act?

● How do learning objects, learning outcomes, and assessment broadly writ undermine efforts to decolonize education?

● How is scaffolding presumptive?

● Which identities does this learning experience make room for? Which identities does it censure? Who is left out? Who is brought in?

● Is this learning space permeable? Does it acknowledge its context within the world where learners live, work, and play?

Teaching is an act of solidarity with learners.