Losing ‘control’ of a class used to be a source of anxiety for me. (I even wrote about it in a post on this very site in 2021!) In my earliest days as a professor, I sought comfort in having every last detail of a course planned out. A fully-packed syllabus calendar, brimming with discussion topics, readings, and assignments filled me with something akin to professorial peace — a game plan for the semester, some pre-prepared guidance for us all to rely on. As I’ve slowly embraced aspects of Open Pedagogy these past three or four years, I’ve noticed a gradual but perceptible shift: now I actually prefer courses with (carefully built-in) unknowns — and maybe even some blank spots. A spare syllabus might divide the semester in “six units”, with subjects and materials and even assessments “TBA”.
Working together with students to co-create a course — in real time, as the semester unfolds in front of us — has been a satisfying component of my recent teaching. 2023 marks the third summer that I’ve worked explicitly to develop a course around the Open Pedagogy principles of “co-creating with students”. In the summer of 2021, my “Music of Texas” course asked students to collaboratively construct a website that cataloged their independent research and creative projects. (The course ran again as an Honors course in Spring 2022, with a new website for a new cohort of students.) In the summer of 2022, I worked on a version of a Connected Core course called “Representations of the Criminal”. Rather than build a collaborative portfolio of finished work on a website, I integrated students into an even more fundamental stage of the course design — they supplied many of the discussion topics and offered topical songs to be analyzed. Eventually we settled into a routine: “Mondays are for Prof. Davis to bring in ideas, Wednesdays are for students to bring in ideas.” This division of labor proved to be stimulating and engaging, both for the students and for me as a professor. Refocusing the course on my students’ interests required me to cede ‘control’ in ways that I hadn’t considered before — I couldn’t lead a discussion on censorship, say, from a place of absolute authority when I didn’t even know in advance what songs the students would bring in!
This summer, I worked on a new version of a Connected Core course called “Algorithms and the Arts”. Reflecting on my past courses, I thought consciously about all the advantages of co-creating with students — even in the fundamental design of the course. I spent the summer reading, researching, and learning about artificial intelligence, gathering ideas and tools for the course. But I refrained from creating a week-by-week breakdown or picking specific readings to assign on specific dates. Instead, I collected about 50 possible readings, put them in a folder called “Possible Readings”, and… stopped. Of course, I’ll draw on this folder as needed, but the principles of co-creation mandated that I didn’t ‘overplan’ the semester before meeting with the students.
During the first week of class, I introduced my class to the broad ideas of the course — “What is an algorithm? What is artificial intelligence? What can AI do? What is its relationship to art and creativity?” — and then I assigned a broadly speculative first discussion post: “What are you curious about?” I asked students to write two or three questions about the subject, anything that sparked their interest. Reading through these questions together in class gave me tremendous insight into this particular group of students, and it inspired me to propose a loose structure for the rest of the semester: the student questions fell into four broad categories (technical concerns, artistic concerns, legal concerns, and ethical concerns). As we read through the questions together, we assigned a category to each. These four categories — inspired by the students’ own curiosities — will now serve as framing devices to our classroom conversation for the rest of the semester. This kind of co-creation, where I step away from the lectern and offer to share even the fundamental design of the course with students, has led me to some exciting and unfamiliar places in the classroom.
