One of the things I love about the open pedagogy initiative is that it operates through some of the same concepts that are at the heart of my research. Karen Barad suggests that as researchers, we should consider our work diffraction rather than reflection, understanding that it is the overlapping patterns of information that build new forms of knowledge. Along with this, open pedagogy is plastic, taking on new forms as it passes through new contexts, and also represents the concept of distributed cognition: the idea that cognition as a process is always reliant on multiple agents and environments, a recursive process that exists beyond the bounds of any one individual.
My own fellowship project has certainly shown this diffractive, plastic, distributed form of creation. I started with the idea of having students build a website in which they would explore the “design of self”: how self is formed through various intra-actions with environments. This has changed over time due to the shifting of student interest. Within an Honors section of English 1112, I introduced this concept to my students, who then began to question—through exploration of their own self-formation—the information they were exposed to, and the credibility of this information. Rather than the “self maps” I’d planned to incorporate in the website, the students decided to do individual reports on misinformation within the media they most often used—YouTube, TikTok, Instagram—as well as within sources more traditionally taken as credible at face value—journalism, textbooks, scholarship.
The students suggested that these “reports on misinformation” could be useful to others within their demographic who were relying on certain media outlets for their knowledge base, and we decided to change the website to an ongoing repository of such reports. I plan, during the coming semesters, to combine the reports already completed with those produced by the students in my courses: not only English 1112, but other writing intensive courses dependent on source analysis and integration. This provides an ideal way for students to begin critical examination of the motives and biases embedded within various messages to determine credibility. But it is also the beginning of an initiative I believe could be incredibly helpful for other students beginning their critical journeys.
I am hoping to eventually organize these reports within a searchable format, so that visitors to the site will be able to find specific examples of misinformation by subject, genre, platform and author. Ideally, it would expand eventually beyond University of New Haven: I have been speaking with colleagues at Southern Illinois University and California State University about this project, and plan to reach out to the writing directors of other Connecticut universities to begin similar projects, the artifacts of which could be combined with those I am compiling. Such a resource would be incredibly helpful for any course devoted to critical examination of messages, especially those with a student-centered approach.
As a final note, that “design of the self” idea has since been moved to the creation of a standalone course titled appropriately enough “Design of the Self.” Piloting Spring of 2024, it combines literature, philosophy, and neuroscience to guide students through a critical examination of the concept of self and how this concept is shaped. Through recognition of external influence and plasticity, power in self-formation is shifted to students as they create their own definitions of self, success, happiness, and fulfillment. Along with my own research, the open pedagogy fellowship had much to do with the initial design of this course.
