Open Politics and Education (original) (raw)

Open Politics and Education

The educational dimensions of Openness elicit very strong and impassioned responses. On the one hand are Open activists and advocates, who see the promises of open, especially those arising with digital and distributed networked technologies, as the panacea to a lot of contemporary challenges at building just, fair, and safe educational platforms. Openness, for them, encompasses a wide spectrum of processes, values, and ideologies, ranging from calls for dismantling the classroom to the augmentation of existing pedagogic practices that would change the inequalities of power and inequities of ownership that are identified as key critiques of the modernist-capitalist university framework. On the other hand are the Open skeptics, who point out that the unbridled celebration of openness is both utopian and unsustainable. Eschewing the idea of the Open as an alternative, they are quick to point out that open is equally constructed by positions of power and can often be exclusionary and discriminatory, toward those who do not offer themselves to be opened up. Openness, in these discourses, emerges as a powerful force but not innocent of the erosion of agency and engagement that it seeks out to correct. The conversation between these two factions is often heated and confrontational. However, taking sides necessitates the production of Openness as a black box, where instead of being a method and an instrument to achieve larger principles and ideals, Openness becomes the very object of inquiry and the lens through which it is studied. We need to rescue Openness from this mystical status and map it at various levels of lived and embodied reality to produce it as an intersectional standpoint that addresses the promises and perils of Openness in education.