For this weeks topic and scenario, we decided to address openness in education and teaching from challenges and opportunities. To help us denote just what we mean by that we landed on the three dimensional model as presented by Dalsgaard and Thestrup (2015): communication, transparency, and engagement.

When reading up on various challenges and opportunities, I cam across the article written by Bearman and Ajjawi (2018), on what they perceive to be myths around transparency around assessment criteria in education. While the article discuss assessment criteria, I find it applicable in many other contexts too involving teaching and education as a whole. Some of the key takeaways I found was that:

• there is knowledge that cannot be expressed, i.e., holistic tacit knowledge. As such, any transparent standards and criteria or how an activity should be carried must simplify the complex nature of the work in order to assess it.
• transparency is in the eye of the beholder, i.e., if activities or criteria are socially constructed based on tacit knowledge, they are perceived and interpreted on an individual’s social history and standing. As such, what is transparent for an expert in the field may be opaque to the student.
• what does visibility conceal? That is to say, by describing an activity or assessment criteria, the teacher is implicitly saying: the student should pay attention to this. In so doing directing students’ attention away from that.

As an effect of these “challenges”, transparency could lead to a misguided attempt to control students’ output in a way that helps them meet the criteria, but not necessarily learn. Or in other words, transparency may control how students see knowledge.