“This was pretty much all my idea.”

~Robin DeRosa

Robin never really said that* but her work did directly inspire this project. At the 2016 Open Education Conference in Richmond, Virginia, Robin DeRosa from Plymouth State University gave a talk on the Open Anthology of American Literature (https://openamlit.pressbooks.com/). In that talk, Robin described how she and her students had not just used an open resource for their course. They created their own. Together they made a textbook for themselves. The talk opened my eyes to the fact that an Open Educational Resource wasn’t just for saving some money for the students. That’s just one pathway in. They could be so much more than that. They could also be a fundamental piece of the pedagogy and the basis for building a community of learners in your courses. The resource was not just a part of the course, it is of the course.

At the same time, the Learning Design & Support Team at Fleming College was tasked with revising and re-developing our faculty development model for the college. So I thought, why not create something like what Robin and her students had made? Let’s make a how-to-teach manual for each other. Something we can hand to new teachers coming in to our systems and say “We wrote this for you”. It only took a mere six months after that to come up with the metaphor of the community quilt of pedagogy and for the patches to start streaming in. Now we have a collection of 21 stories that tell us how teachers do their teaching in their context. They come from across Canada, the U.S. and Egypt by people who truly love to see their students succeed. We hope you enjoy it and we hope we get to do it again for other things like course design and professional learning. We’d especially like to do one of these by students about how they do the learning themselves. Stay tuned!

*Robin did say that it was okay to pretend that she did take full credit.

Want to print this book? Here are the OKTP (Okay to print) files