Open and Opening Syllabus: Successes and Challenges of Democratic Education in Higher
Ed
Format: Group Session: Practitioner Inquiry (75 min)
Participants:
1
Eugene
2
Scott
3
Ana
4
Leslie
5
Kathy
6
Bryan
7
Lei
8
Liz
9
Angela
10
Hannah
Matusov
Richardson
Marjanovic-Shane
Gates
von Duyke
Campbell
Chen
Hill
Kost
Kilby
ematusov@udel.edu
Scott.Richardson@millersville.edu
anamshane@gmail.com
Leslie.Gates@millersville.edu
kvond@udel.edu
bcamp@udel.edu
leich@UDel.Edu
ekhill@millersville.edu
akkost@millersville.edu
hlkilby@millersville.edu
1
2
3
2
1
1
1
2
2
2
1 University of Delaware, United States of America
2 Millersville University, United States of America
3 Chestnut Hill College, United States of America
Abstract (100 words):
Open Syllabus Education (OSE) as realization of Democratic Education at Higher Ed involves
engaging students in decision making about all aspects of their education and democratic selfgovernance. In this interactive symposium, we engage the audience and ourselves in reflection
and investigations of our pedagogical successes and challenges during our 3-year OSE
experimentation with diverse undergraduate and graduate education classes. The presenters
involve teachers and students from diverse universities, diverse approaches and attitudes to OSE.
We will use various ethnographic data including cases from our own OSE teaching and learning
to analyze and discuss our experiences.
Keywords: democratic education, agency, critical dialogue, survival, institutional pressure
Proposal (1,500 words):
The symposium’s purpose is to collectively investigate our 3-year innovative pedagogical
experiences, as teachers and students, to introduce Democratic Education (DE) at the Higher
Education levels (undergraduate and graduate) in the 3 universities. DE involves students’ active
participation in decision-making in their education and democratic self-governance of the
educational community (see Shor, 1996, for an example of DE at the Higher Education level).
We have labeled our DE pedagogical design as Open and Opening Syllabus Education (OSE). In
contrast to Closed Syllabus, where all decisions about courses are made unilaterally and in
advance by teachers, in the Open Syllabus pedagogical design, all decisions are made by students
with assistance from instructors during the class term. In Opening Syllabus design, the scope and
scale of students’ decision-making gradually increases in the course term.
In the past 3 years of experimenting with OSE in diverse academic subject areas with
mostly education major undergraduate and graduate students — pre- and in- service teachers and
future educational researchers, White and Black, middle and working class, — we have been
faced with many dilemmas, challenges, failures, and successes. We collected ethnographic data
from more than 20 courses before, in, and after class as: surveys, online class communication,
students’ feedback on classes, paper track of collective decision making, reflective
communications and diaries on emergent problems, audio recordings of class meetings and
regular OSE conferences, and email communication with students.
We want to treat the symposium as research dialogue helping us address issues on OSE
and raise new ones by experimenting with the symposium format to make it compatible with the
OSE pedagogical design. In contrast to conventional Closed Proposal Presentation, where
presenters define research issues in advance and unilaterally from the audience, in our proposed
Open Proposal Presentation, after brief introduction about OSE, we will share with the
symposium audience a Presentation Map listing about 20 possible issues ready to present and
discuss. The audience may add and select their own inquiries and will engage in democratic
decision-making similar to students in our OSE classes. The presenters involve teachers and
students from diverse universities, diverse approaches and attitudes to OSE. Below we provide
brief elaborations on some issues that will be possible to discuss as listed on our Presentation
Map.
Democracy vs. Culture
One big OSE teacher concern is whether in the context of the US conventional university
higher education, the democratic process alone can propel the emergence of a productive
educational culture. We define a productive educational culture as a learning environment and
experiences for the students that promote and support dialogic ontological provocations, critical
dialogue among the immediate and remote participants about values of targeted practices,
exposure to alternative ideas and diverse practices, self-assignments, learning journey, and so on.
On the one hand, there are many reasons for OSE students to abandon any commitment
to learning within a conventional university: many students do not have traditions of owning and
governing their own education, there are many urgent impositions and necessities coming from
other traditional classes and aspects of their lives. As a result, some OSE students may push for
minimizing their study efforts and learning experiences and thus jeopardize the emergence of a
productive educational culture in a democratic OSE.
On the other hand, in our OSE experimentation in conventional universities provide
interesting cases of an emergent learning culture. For example, in one OSE class with no reading
assignments, at some point, students started demanding reading assignments from the professor.
They were “sick and tired” of their own opinions in the classroom critical dialogue, emerging
from teacher’s ontological provocations, and wanted “facts” to ground and test their conflicting
opinions. We wonder if problems of the emergence of productive educational culture in an
imposition-free OSE may come from the OSE instructors’ own struggle with limitations of their
own vision of imposition-free democracy and conflicting pedagogical desires shaped by previous
non-OSE experiences.
OSE students’ distrust
Students’ may distrust OSE professors based on their suspicions that while calling for
democratic decision-making, professors may have hidden agendas pushing one decision over
others. Since OSE professors are armed with institutional power, they remain Benevolent
Dictators who may redefine or revoke the democratic pedagogical regime at his/her will at any
moment. Also, there is a tendency in Progressive Education to make students “educated
subjects”, a Foucauldian term (Fendler, 1998), in which a teacher wants students to want what
the teacher wants them to want, “let him [the student] always think he is master while you [the
teacher] are really master” (Rousseau, 1979, p. 120). OSE instructors must constantly reflect
on/revise their pedagogical desires to make them compatible with the OSE democratic
principles. Alternatively, students may hunt for what instructors “want.” For example, in an OSE
graduate class, many students spent 20 minutes discussing how many pages their research report
should be. They committed to write, ignoring other students and the instructor who argued that
the length was completely up to them in the OSE classroom. They apparently tried to read what a
“schoolish” expectation for length was.
Students may distrust themselves to learn without impositions from the instructor. From
our class surveys, we learned some are happy to reduce study burden to minimum, if not to zero,
but they worry about missed learning opportunities. Some students distrust themselves to make
good decisions and/or to carry them through. Yet they are ambivalent because when asked if they
would prefer to switch to a Closed Syllabus they said that they enjoyed the class freedom.
Arguably, a conventional Closed Syllabus pedagogical regime creates a vicious cycle of robbing
students from their academic agency by denying them from decision-making about their own
education and at the same time constantly using impositions in response to students’ lack of
learning activism. OSE is aimed at breaking this vicious cycle by giving students freedom,
opportunity for decision-making about their own education, self-governance and responsibility.
These processes are not possible without students’ taste of misuse and abuse these freedoms. The
issue is whether democratic processes and democratic self-governance are enough to nurture
learning activism and student academic agency, particularly in situations where students’
exposure to OSE courses is minimal.
Anarchist and Communitarian OSE
Reflecting on our collective OSE teaching practices, we have discovered that we use two
different teaching approaches to OSE. One approach, Communitarian OSE, is aimed at creating
students’ accountability to each other. In Communitarian OSE, students collectively impose
assignments, summative assessments (i.e., grades), attendance requirements, retributions, and so
on. Similar pedagogical experiments in the Soviet Union were developed by Makarenko (1973)
in the 1920-1930s and by the Communard movement in the 1970-1980s (Sidorkin, 1995).
In contrast, in Anarchist OSE classes, each student is viewed as an individual pathfinder
in his/her own education. There is no imposition by students on each other. The professor is
always ready to create individualized plans as a part of the Anarchist OSE, including Closed
Syllabus if this is what students want. Students test their own learning desires without necessary
considering their peers’ desires. In the Anarchist approach, collectivity is based on critical
dialogue and everything “becomes dialogically tested and forever testable” (Morson, 2004, p.
319). Voting or a passed rule can never replace critical persuasion. The right to be different, to be
the Other, and, thus, to leave any collective bind of “mutual accountability” at any time for any
reason is the inalienable right in the Anarchist OSE approach (Kukathas, 2003).
In our comparative observations, Communitarian OSE students, having more
commitment to their own education, probably through “mutual accountability,” come to class
more actively prepared than Anarchist OSE students. Communitarian OSE students expect
education from themselves, peers, and the professor, while Anarchist OSE students more
frequently expect the professor to provide education to them for their consumption.
Alternatively, students’ activism may take more time to develop in the Anarchist OSE. Anarchist
OSE classes seem to be focused on promoting more students’ responsive authorship through
professors’ dialogic provocations while Communitarian OSE classes seem to be more focused on
promoting students’ self-generated authorship, although both types of dialogic authorship are
present in both types of OSE classes (Matusov, 2011). In the Anarchist OSE, the professor has
more equal power with the students, who can only suggest and not impose on each other. In
contrast, in the Communitarian OSE, the professor seems to have lesser official power than the
students who can impose on each other while the teacher cannot. However, the professor may
have more informal power through charismatic steering collective peer imposition.
Tentative Presentation Map
 Democracy vs. Culture
 Presentation of Open Syllabus
o Starting with or without Closed Syllabus
o Democratic decision making vs. just doing education
 Student Experience
o Distrust of an OSE professor and themselves
o Experiencing several OSE classes
o Perspectives from a dissatisfied and a satisfied student
o Luxury and agency vs. Scarcity and survival (role of hidden impositions)
o OSE for students from various socio-economic classes
 Professor Experiences and Roles
o Wrong and conflicting pedagogical desires
o Variations in ideological approaches (communitarian, anarchist)
 Imposition in OSE vs. student agency
 Critical dialogue in OSE
 What are the pros and cons of each model?
o Changes of views on and practices of OSE with time
o OSE professor’s orientation:
 Performance, having a role
 Alive teaching, no orientation
 Forms of a Syllabus (pedagogical regimes)
o Open
o Opening…
o Closed
 Survival of professors in a conventional institutional context
o Institutional pressures and tensions “grade inflation"
o Tenured and non-tenured faculty
o OSE students may try to bring democratic practices to conventional classes and
thus create conflicts with other, conventional, professors and students.