I wanted to express my thanks to all of you for participating in the smaller than usual Spring Cohort of the Open Pedagogy Fellowship! Professor Lili Grigorian turned out to be our only fellow. We appreciate Lili’s fascinating project, which will be a valuable contribution not just to her students, but to the OER/Open Ed landscape of content here at KCC and in the academic community worldwide. We also benefitted from the presence of past Open Pedagogy Fellow Professor Dmitry Brogan. In addition to our Fellows, present and past, we acknowledge the valuable, attentive and robust feedback that our student Sunny Parikh provided in both the Winter and Spring 2023 Cohorts. Sunny’s presence elevated the our Fellowship beyond measure. Our work is useless without students and the work of open pedagogy is one that centers students, viewing them as crucial co-creators in the classroom. Thank you for being a crucial co-creator here, Sunny!

As the facilitator for the past two cycles, I still have a lot to learn about open pedagogy. But I’ve learned about new scholars who enliven and inspire my continuing connection to it. I reference Cate Denial constantly. Her “pedagogy of kindness”– has changed the way I work with students in the library and in the classroom: her essay, by the way, “A Pedagogy of Kindness” really might blow your mind. As well, I was blown away by Professor Maha Bali, our Open Ed Showcase Keynote speaker. Her emphasis on community and connection, her attaching open education to her metaphor of “scattering rose petals” is dismantles me and makes me see everything differently. Iterations of openness, “vulnerability” ( via both Denial and Bali), and community is how we this work will endure.

Speaking of our campus, I wanted to acknowledge some crucial people, and those you can call on to help you going forward in your open education work:

Open Education Faculty Coordinator: Shawna Brandle (our go-to person for open course design); KCTL Director, Ryan McKinney; Instructional Designer Susan Lambert; and Institutional Repository Librarian Michael Kirby! And–I will always be your OpenEd Librarian. Feel free to reach out to me, too!