Let us reimagine openness: Case study-The women of Kookal

 

 

 

    Yet, when they try to access a formalised open educational system, they don’t have the basic literacy skills to gain “entry” to even the local high school. Really?  Yes, none of them can gain access to a local open school even if they want to.  The reason, they don’t know the alphabets of English or Tamil.

    While I sit here and debate “open,” I am left wondering what educational values  are we showing them by deciding what is open, by reflecting on what was open, how far we have come,  and by deciding what to open. What makes us gatekeepers to open education? Why can’t we begin with Gardeners’ idea of multiple intelligences (2011) and reframe  access to open education as a basic desire to learn, a willingness to expose oneself to the rigours of developing critical thinkers, readers and writers. Isn’t it privilege then that these open educational platforms are designed to have a check at entry points? Should these supposedly open platforms even have an entry point? Should it be called open? Isn’t it shut for these women?

     Take  SWAYAM for example, an Indian  open educational platform that exposes students to subject knowledge in both English and the State languages. However open it seemingly is, it still remains cut off for these women who can’t read or write but whose auditory learning skills are excellent. How is open education a liberating structure, when we can’t be open about access points to open education?

     Yet, I admit, there were some of them who view education encapsulated in reading and writing as non essential skills. What was more important  to them was to suss out a neighbour’s lie, to ensure that “backup plans” were truly backup. No amount of impressing upon them the value of reading before you sign any document, and no  amount of impressing upon them how education opens up a world would get them to even join the community for basic skills of reading and writing. To them an education  meant imparting values  that included being a good human and being a valuable participatory member of the community. These skill  were more greatly valued and respected than to read and write. 

    Thus, I am left to be ask myself the following rhetorical question- Are we even beginning to be open about open?

Assumption 2- Digital Skills have pedagogical utility

    As I stated before,  each of these women has digital skills, they were able to access YouTube videos for recipes, listen to their favourite politician drone on  and  critically analyse the political climate there after, and learn about skin whitening creams by ordering things on Amazon. Each time there was a community meeting, they were able to  prepare agendas and minutes of the meeting, critically decide which infrastructure needed attention by doing a comparative analysis to things available at the State capital. 

     While digital literacy includes more than accessing and consuming  material online, what will these performative actions of the women be called?  Can we call this ability to access and share knowledge a part of open learning? What happens when an email address is your access gantry pass for most of these open access knowledge structures? They quote Bruce Lee to me (who remains a hero them).”Be like water.” They gain access with their children’s email address.  They don’t own an address, but they gain access by whatever means they think is necessary.

     I say digital skills have pedagogical utility which we aim to teach formally in these open networked learning platforms. Yet marginalised communities, despite lack of access find means and ways to access these systems  that  seems so remote to them. 

     They learn in time to remix and redistribute this knowledge in nuggets or byte size to the rest of the community. If one women learns that the hill gradient effects  the flow dynamics of the water feeding her field, she comes back and asked the community to think of ways to harvest rain water and what ways each of the farms can be fed water equally.  It is not selfish knowledge gained, but common knowledge garnered for the whole community. I am because we are is the value they live by, are educated in and educate their children with. Thus, digital skills have more tangible outcomes than narrowly defined  as pedagogical utility.

Assumption 3- Technological Enablers truly frame open education

     I don’t think open education  is truly enabled by technological enablers alone.  Instead  if we don’t see the diploma or degree as a  goalpost or even signage of learning, of education, then  open education is enabled by disruptive values too. 

    What values am I talking about- the value of justice and equity, of  inclusion. I call them disruptive as these are value assumptions upon which every open learning system, network, environment, and platform is built on presently. Yet if  I bring any of these women and encourage them to join any of the available platforms, can they truly join them? Can they be heard? Can their arrival at answers how ever different be acknowledged and appreciated?  Can their voices also contribute to curating, creating and sharing knowledge? I frankly don’t think so.

    I end with an appeal that we must have greater openness for better inclusion and social diversity in education. In many ways I learn from these women to stay truly open about learning.

PS: An aside. I called up my friends at Kookal and told them I wrote about them. They were so happy. Just a few reactions to note:
” Tell them we are good teachers, you learnt to speak Tamil didn’t you?”
” Tell them good, better, best, never let is rest, until good becomes better and better best.” I taught them this, they repeated it back to me and said we will learn every day but our way, of understanding what to do rather than the sound and spelling.”
“Tell them we can do TickTok videos of imitating people very well.”

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