“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures...In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education. We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.

When the open pedagogy principles of collaboration, sharing, and learner agency get applied to assignments, they transform from a disposable, transactional exchange between student and teacher into an invitation from teachers to students to engage in a deeper form of scholarship. They “provide students with opportunities to engage in meaningful work, add value to the world, and provide a foundation for future students to learn from and build upon” (Larson, 2023). The assignment is “designed to be reused and revisited by more than just the student and their instructor” (Capilano University Library, 2022).