I've been involved with open education for years, and the work for me has always been about hope—hope that we could build a more equitable, humane, diverse, and sustainable ecosystem for learning and for the sharing of knowledge. This year I begin my 30th year working in US higher education, and I'm dismayed that my daily work seems to take me farther and farther away from a hopeful horizon. In this presentation, I'll take a page from climate activist Greta Thunberg, who often eschews a rhetoric of hope in favor of a rhetoric of panic and action. What are the forces that not only threaten our hopes, but violently twist our work until it loses potency? What is the meaning of “open” in a world where words like “access,” “inclusion,” and “diversity” are routinely co-opted for profit? What culpability do we bear if we (continue to) do our good work in contexts that minimize, appropriate, poison, or exploit that work? Feeling good about where we are headed? This is not the session for you.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Define neoliberalism and explain how it threatens work in open education;
- Ask critical questions about their own complicity in systems that do harm to learning and to learners;
- Reconsider the tenor of a movement focused around hope, and strategize about how we could revision open for a more dire and dangerous current context.
