By The concept of the Open Syllabus Education (OSE) is relatively simple. Instead all educational decisions being made by the teacher, school, and state as it is normally done in the Close Syllabus Education (CSE), in OSE all educational decisions – what to study, when, how, why, how to assess it if at all, and how to organize it (including the decision of whether or not to use OSE) – are done by the students themselves, “a good school is the freedom to establish its own direction” (Farber, 1970, p. 39). The OSE approach is not new and apparently runs rather long in history and in diverse places and settings from Socratic dialogues, especially in Meno, (Plato & Bluck, 1961), to modern Democratic Education movement (Summerhill, Sudbury Valley School, The Circle School), “Socrates café” (Phillips, 2002), “learning circles” organized by prisoners of the South African apartheid (Mandela, 1995), calls for “deschooling society” and “educational networks” (Illich, 1983), calls for learning from and with students — "Ignorant Schoolmaster" (Rancière, 1991), homeschooling (Llewellyn, 1998), “empowerment of students” (Farber, 1970; Shor, 1996; Ellsworth, 1992), and so on.
The only Open Syllabus pedagogical practice in Higher Education prior to our own experiences known to us that inspire us was by Ira Shor's 1996 book "When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy":
"Shor provides the reader with a reenactment of one semester that shows what really can happen when one applies the theory and democratizes the classroom. This is the story of one class in which Shor tried to fully share with his students control of the curriculum and of the classroom. After twenty years of practicing critical teaching, he unexpectedly found himself faced with a student uprising that threatened the very possibility of learning. How Shor resolves these problems, while remaining true to his commitment to power-sharing and radical pedagogy, is the crux of the book. Unconventional in both form and substance, this deeply personal work weaves together student voices and thick descriptions of classroom experience with pedagogical theory to illuminate the power relations that must be negotiated if true learning is to take place." (Amazon's review)
Here is my autobiographical trajectory to OSE as far I can reflect on it:
1) I think I attended an Openning Syllabus High School back in Moscow#91 1974-1977, "Back in the Soviet Union, in Moscow, I attended a special high school 91 that was a pedagogic lab for the Soviet Pedagogical Academy. Some of my teachers were graduate students working with a very famous Russian educational psychologist Davydov. But at the same time, the school was innovative also for a completely different reason. It was run by a number of people, who were interested in math education, and so it had very many diverse sources of pedagogic innovations…. I actually chose that school, because I was interested in math, so it was a school that had a special focus in math and science. The science at that time was mostly defined by physics, rather than chemistry or something else. So, math education was interesting because it was organized by a person, whose name is Konstantinov. He invited undergraduate college students who were highly interested in and enthusiastic about math to teach us math. They were teaching us in a very interesting way. They gave us very interesting and serious math problems, which we could do in class or we could leave this classroom and do them elsewhere. I remember at some point we were asking our teachers to provide some guidance and they were doing that. So they were mostly teaching when we asked them to teach. When we solved the problem, we were telling them the solutions and sometimes asking for help. It was a very strange way [of teaching] because they were mostly providing some lectures, for example, where we asked them in advance. Without this explicit request from us, they would not do it. Plus, the problems were very different from traditional math problems. For example, I remember we were asked to develop alternative axioms for arithmetic to see what kind of new math would be taking off from that, and what practical application it might have in real life. Or, we were learning about computers by playing in the computers, like life computers, so we were creating programs for each other and seeing… we were enacting the programs. There were many interesting pedagogical innovations. We had several different branches of math taught by completely different people with completely different ideas of how to teach it. We learned math from people from the most prestigious Soviet university, which is Moscow State University. So that was one side.
But another side was physics. The physics teachers were graduate students of Vasiliy Davydov, a student of Leont’ev who was a founder of Activity Theory and a colleague of Vygotsky. They conducted some psychological experiments with us, plus one of the teachers, who was my physics teacher, was very dialogic in his way of teaching.
He was dialogic in a very particular way, I would say he was Socratically dialogic. He constantly challenged any statements we made, which sometimes was very discouraging for some of us. Thus, I remember he was teaching physics by introducing interesting problems-provocations for us, and then we would discuss and approach to them. One of the problems, I still remember, was about why in the locations where there is a lot of sun people have black skin, while in the locations where there is a lack of sun, people have white skin. From a straight physics point of view, it should actually be reverse, because white surface better reflects the sun, and black is actually more absorbs the sun. From this straight physics point of view, it should be reverse: black people should live in the places with little sun while white people should live in the places of a lot of sun. Europeans should have been black, and Africans should have been white. Why is that not the case? So, puzzles like that. Plus, he had a very interesting style of dialoguing because he crushed almost any position that you had. Which upset a lot of students who didn't like him because of that.
I was upset but I liked him a lot. He puzzled me and I was intrigued by him. Once I introduced his own position to him probably to please him or maybe in agreement with him. I expected that he would affirm that position, since it was his own and he was invested in it. To my big surprise, he crushed it as well… Possibly he might not have a good memory and did not recognize his own points that he used to crush my own position in past. After that, I was intentionally bringing his own past arguments to see how he would crush them. I have learned a lot from him – his self-dialogue — not to stick with dear positions and constantly to seek for limitations of my own ideas.
2) When I started my own teaching back in the USSR as a physics teacher I tried to find holy crail of dialogic teaching. My teaching then and, it’s probably now, was very… I would say, looking back, uneven. Partly because at that time, I really didn't know much about pedagogy — what good teaching is, — which probably was good because I would have studied traditional pedagogy to learn about it. Although, traditional pedagogy had interesting sides as well, especially when it is contextualized into a subject area and so on. But anyway, I struggled as a young unexperienced and pedagogically ignorant teacher. One thing I remember that was interesting for me, one struggle was how to engage students in physics, the subject I taught in school. How can a teacher genuinely engage students in learning physics, especially those students who might be not very interested in that? How can a teacher make all students interested and passionate? Then I believed that it is possible, if a teacher finds the right pedagogical tricks.
I invited my physics schoolteacher, my former high schoolteacher, to the classes I taught, and I was observing how he made his teaching magic, getting almost all students involved, this was at least how it felt at time. And again, some students hated him for crushing their ideas — but! They might hate him, but they were definitely engaged in physics. At that time, I thought his magic was about asking students good questions. So, I tried to write down all his questions, and I used these questions again in my other classes but nothing good happened. I also noted that sometimes I was successful … and I tried to remember what I did… aha!…
Well, sometimes I had parallel classes in the same grade, teaching different students the same topics. So, if I got something pedagogically successful, I was just thinking, “In an hour or two I will apply this to the next [group].”, “Best practice!” – ha, ha, ha! Except, it didn't work at all. And I thought, “What was the trick?!”
I felt, on one hand, it was something systematic, my seasoned schoolteacher came and created this teaching magic in a predictable way; but, on the other hand, what is it about, why cannot it be repeated using word-by-word, letter-by-letter?! If it was not about asking good questions, what was it? He came to my classes not knowing much about my students and his questions were about physics, but when I repeated them they did not work! Why? Also, I noticed that he never repeated his own questions. Something was always new, exciting, and fresh.
3) As a graduate student in developmental psychology I experienced dialogic teaching by some of my professors in the USA especially by my advisor Professor Barbara Rogoff.
4) When I started my own teaching in the USA, I have developed my own dialogic teaching based on Open Dialogic Instruction:
Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into dialogic pedagogy (13-chapter monograph). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers.
Matusov, E., DePalma, R. & Drye, S. (2007). Whose development? Salvaging the concept of development within a sociocultural approach to education. Educational Theory, 57 (4), 403-421.
Matusov, E., Smith, M., Candela, M. A., & Lilu, K. (2007). “Culture has no internal territory”: Culture as dialogue. In J. Valsiner & A. Rosa (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Socio-Cultural Psychology (pp. 460-483). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Matusov, E., & Smith, M. P. (2007). Teaching imaginary children: University students’ narratives about their Latino practicum children. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(5), 705-729.
Hayes, R., & Matusov, E. (2005). Designing for dialogue in place of teacher talk and student silence. Culture and Psychology, 11(3), 339-357.
Matusov, E., Hayes, R., & Pluta, M. J. (2005). Using a discussion web to develop an academic community of learners. Educational Technology & Society, 8(2), 16-39.
Matusov, E., St. Julien, J., & Hayes, R. (2005). Building a creole educational community as the goal of multicultural education for preservice teachers. In L.V. Barnes (Ed.), Contemporary Teaching and Teacher Issues, pp. 1-38. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers.
Hayes, R., & Matusov, E. (2005). From ‘ownership’ to dialogic addressivity: Defining successful digital storytelling projects, Technology, Humanities, Education, Narrative (THEN) Journal, March 3, available online: http://thenjournal.org/feature/75.
Matusov, E. (2001). Intersubjectivity as a way of informing teaching design for a community of learners classroom. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17(4), 383-402.
5) By the beginning of 2008, I become more and more dissatify with Open Dialogic Instruction peagogical regime. "[Even] back then, in my terrific innovative high school, I often felt tired with these excellent assignments… as a student, I remember that very well. On the one hand, I felt constantly being tired of these terrific thought provoking assignments, — and not only me, other students, my peers, felt like that, it was like, “Oh gosh… and another thing to do”. It was constant struggle for having your own time, your own learning activism, and your own self-assignments. At the same time, I got very excited about some of the assignments and exposure to deep math that the teachers did to us. I started doing something new in response to the teachers’ terrific assignments. Now I almost had to fight with my exciting initiatives that I was running in my head to let the perpetual flow of the teachers’ assignments go. So, the teachers’ assignments provoked something very interesting in me – and then I started competing with them for my own ideas and initiatives, and it's… ah, I felt very tiresome, with this constant flow of the teachers’ assignments. Very ambivalent and confusing indeed. Currently, I see it as a struggle in Dialogic Pedagogy between the student’s responsive authorship — an authorship that comes to the student’s response to somebody else’s provocation and assignment — and the student’s self-generated authorship — an authorship that comes from the student’s own learning initiatives, self-assignments, and learning journeys."
"My [undergraduate and graduate college] students got very excited with my assignments — I saw clearly that. The class was very dialogic in its nature. But they also were tired and confused, similar to me in my high school. There was something missing in my view. I came to a realization that they didn't feel ownership over what they did. I mean, it's also not exactly true – they felt kind of ownership, but also they had a feeling that they were not having ownership. I was constantly commanding them, “You need to do this” or “You need to do that,” which was with the graduate students even more interesting because this were people who came, or many of them came to become scholars… And the practice of scholarship, I believe, strongly requires the participants’ self-generated authorship. Also, I had known some of them well outside of the class and I was excited because they demonstrated this ownership for their own learning and scholarship. We had had almost the same discussions in class and out of class, or almost the same kind of experience, in terms of its intellectual nature in the class and outside of the class. Outside of the class, it felt like a free thing, but in class this felt to my students like that they worked to please me and do it “for me”. I asked them, 'Why to please me? You need to please yourself, rather than me,” so I couldn't understand what it was coming from, all this oppressive part of the school.
Of course, one can say it was because we were in an oppressive institution of conventional university, which is true; but on the other hand, a conventional university has a lot of freedom, and power for the professor to do a lot of innovative things. I could not justify oppression in my class because of imposition of my traditional institution on me or because of my fear of the institution. Rather, I felt that I didn't know what to do to shake of this real sense of oppression that my students felt in my class. So, gradually through these bizarre pedagogical experiments – I would say disastrous, rather than unsuccessful, ah, I came to a realization that the issues of ownership and democratic decision-making are the key…
Looking back it sounds like a very obvious thing, but ownership was democratic… Without decision making about your own fate, your learning and professional development, when it's absent, it's very difficult to – take ownership of your education. So, that led to my interest in and practice of democratic education. Democratic education has been exemplified by Summerhill in UK, The Circle School in Pennsylvania, the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, and the like. In democratic education schools, students make decisions about what to study, how, and whether to study it at all. Again, I was slowly coming to that through my own teaching while reading what has been done before me in that direction. I studied the existing democratic education practices and have realized that these terrific educators were not coming from a dialogic position either, they were coming from therapeutic or democratic citizenship positions.
I also started investigating my pedagogical desires and I have discovered that many pedagogical desires were progressive in their nature, “How can I make students to want what I want them to want?” Michel Foucault would love that! I have come to a realization that I should legitimize and respect the students’ disengagement, non-cooperation, and non-participation — i.e., their own pedagogical and non-pedagogical desires."
6) In spring 2008, I started my "radical pedagogical experiment in dialogic pedagogy" by abruptly, if not capritious, abandoning and dethroning my unilateral pedagogical regime in the mid of a graduate seminar on Dialogic Pedagogy, "I was trying to apply Bakhtinian dialogism to my own teaching. It was, not completely unsuccessful, but, I would say, it was disastrous rather than unsuccessful, which is not the same thing…. I would say it was rather a successful disaster! A lot of good things happened, but disastrously happened, rather than nothing good happened at all, in my judgment. I really wanted to break with traditional educational chronotope, when students do the professor’s assignments. And, I would say that these assignments that I had were pretty good… maybe. But still, what I didn’t like, the students, at the end of the day, tried to please me… they were working for me. The problem was not that my assignments were bad – they were not bad at all, in my professional judgment. What was bad for me was the fact that almost anything what my students did in the class was driven by my assignments and not by their own professional and learning activism. I wanted to fight it, I wanted to change it."
Matusov, E. & Brobst, J. (2013). Radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its Centauric failure: Chronotopic analysis. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers.
After this disastourous experience, I retrieted to my Open Dialogic Instruction (Opening Syllabus) pedagogical design for a few more years.
7) In fall 2011, I was teaching a new undergraduate class for urban education specialization program "Building Community of Learners in Urban Settings." As Closed Curriculum, I used my rather topics from a science education class that I sucessfully taught before. I chose science education curriculum because I wanted to make this urban education class "hands-on" and I needed some curricular content. Since I used to be a science teacher and had taught successfully course on science education, I thought it would be easier FOR ME to use science education material.
In a few weeks in the fall 2011 semester, my students rebelled against science education curriculum because many of them hated science and not plan to teach it. Encouraged by our in-depth discussion of the concept of "community of learners" they accused me in hypocracy of imposing curriculum on them. After some defense and licking my wounded pride, I had to agree with them and throw the closed curriculum out of the window. I came to idea of Open Curriculum by asking students to generate topics relevant to the class that they wanted to study. It was a rather successful teaching experience (despite some other problems in the class). I suddently remembered reading Ira Shor's 1996 book "When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy" that had similar ideas. I coined a term "Open Syllabus" and suggested my colleagues to re-read and discuss this book during summer 2012. I wanted to prepare for full blowing experiment with "Open Syllabus" (whatever it might meant to me then) in Fall 2012.
8) In spring 2012, I was sharing my germs of idea about "Open Syllabus" to one of my colleague and former graduate student while she told me that "Open Syllabus" had beein already practiced by another forme graduate student at our School of Education, Scottt Richardson. She portrayed his Open Syllabus practice in rather negative terms implying "lazy teaching" because instead of making all necessary professional decisions about his teaching, Scott delegated these decisions to his students. Besides, he relied on his students' teaching each other and themselves (autodidact). I was shocked that he also used exactly the same term. Of course, he had more practice with it and more successful than mine….
I was very excited because from her description, it was exactly what I wanted to try! I wanted to talk with Scott and learned from him about his Open Syllabus. I also wanted to compare my ideas about Open Syllabus with his and invited him for discussion of Ira Shor's book. I contacted Scott at once.
Scott also was influenced by Ira Shor and by Democratic Education (Summerhill and Sudbury Valley School). Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Kathy von Duyke, and Mark Smith joined our discussions. It appeared that I had developed the concepts of Open Dialogic Instruction and Curricular Map while Scott had developed the concepts of Democratic Decision making, Democratic communication, Communitarian regime, and many others. We started our collaboration at once.
9) Our collective focus on Democratic Education in spring 2012 led Ana introduce us to Jim Rietmulder, a founder of The Circle School. We met him and visited his wonderful school in summer 2012. Our frank, challenging, and extremely fruitful discussions helpded and have been helping me confront with my inherent progressivism of imposition of my pedagogical desires on my students.
10) In fall 2012, together with my colleagues Ana and Mark, I have started my OSE classes — Open Sylllabus and Open Curriculum (Opening Syllabus) — at undergraduate and graduate levels.
11) At the same, Scott, Kathy, Ana and I started our OSE online and face-to-face cooperative of discussion of OSE issues, sharing experiences and helping each other. By now it grow to include other OSE instructors, Jim, and our OSE students, having three universities (University of Delaware, Chestnut Hill College, and Millersville University) and The Circle School involved.
PS The quotes came from the article:
Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2014).
Democratic dialogic education for and from authorial agency: An interview with
professor Eugene Matusov, Europe’s Journal of Psychology,
10(1), 9-26, DOI:10.5964/ejop.v10i1.762