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In recent years, the traditional teaching way is gradually broken by open pedagogy which refers to open resources and how teacher teach. According to Hegarty, a lot of benefits cannot be replaced by the traditional teaching way. For example, students can learn a new culture via questioning, playing, and imagination. It helps peer-to-peer learning because it can help students to shape the attitude of diversification of culture. It also increases the student’s openness and trust through sharing resources to each other. The most impressive point is student engagement. For ORE, teacher empowers students to solve problems, take the lead and work together by themselves. In this case, students can learn something more compared to the traditional teaching method. There are also have many benefits of open pedagogy such as peer review, reflective practice, sharing ideas and innovation (Hegarty, B. 2015).
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When I read the open pedagogy chapter, I admitted open pedagogy does have some benefits which cannot be ignored, but I think open pedagogy may work for the majority of people and may not work for the minority of people who have the reading disorder or cannot talk or cannot hear. To be more specific, I mentioned in my blog 3, whether the community works for the reading disorder people? I also have the same doubt about whether the open pedagogy works for the students with specific learning disabilities? For the open pedagogy, it engages the teacher and students to discuss together and the teacher gives the different topic according to the student’s interests. However, this situation may not work for dyslexic students. Even if the students show their interests to the teacher and teacher can adjust their teaching content, but how they communicate with each other effectively and how they exchange information or ideas quickly. Thus, I think the regular open pedagogy strategy may not help to solve those problems. In this case, I just wondering is there already have some special learning methods for those group of people?
The second question is how open pedagogy allocate the resources to every school if I use kindergarten as an example? For some children, they are too young to understand, therefore, they need a teacher to guide or help them to understand. However, open pedagogy relies on the teachers–they need the teacher to adjust their teaching content or teaching method according to different students’ understanding level, but the question is how the teaching resources are allocated? In other words, open pedagogy needs teachers to spend a lot of time to prepare for a different topic and school needs to provide enough resources, but I think the teaching resources and teachers are limited. If children have different groups and teacher empower them to solve the problem by themselves, how many teachers should be allocated for one class? Moreover, I think it is not every country is able to use open pedagogy. For example, China has a large number of population, and students will face the national college entrance exam. If using open pedagogy, the content cannot be finished before the college entrance exam. In this education system, open pedagogy cannot be used.
Although there are some problems exists right now, many educators are trying to fix them. For the first question, there are some studies showed that there already have some specific methods for a dyslexic student with effective pedagogy.
In the 2010 Equality Act, it makes reasonable adjustments for a dyslexic student from reading, seminar discussions, slides, fonts, lighting, and technology. With respect to the seminar discussions, the teacher needs to give frequent break for discussion and reflection so that dyslexic students can have time to bring concepts and ideas together with a slower speed. To be more specific, when a teacher gives a longer break in-class time, they can suggest the students write down questions based on the discussion and come back to these after the break (Hole, A. 2018). This following video is related to Dyslexia teaching.
If I were an educator, I may not only be focused on the open pedagogy, because the open pedagogy focuses on the strategy of teaching to improve their learning. However, for dyslexic students, I think we need to have more important things to pay attention to. For instance, the teacher can give less written work and allow more time for reading. Teachers may not ask them to read aloud because the words are likely to be misread which can cause embarrassment (n.d.). Therefore, I think not only the educator should learn how to teach with effective open pedagogy, but also they need to be careful about the basic teaching skills.
In general, I think open pedagogy can change the way of learning and teaching, and we do enjoy the benefits from open pedagogy. However, I think the open pedagogy still have some problems should be fixed as I mentioned in my paragraph. If we have more solutions for those two questions, I think there are more students can benefit from the open pedagogy.
Reference:
10 Teaching Tips for Dyslexia. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nessy.com/uk/teachers/essential-teaching-tips-dyslexia/
Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources. Educational Technology,55(4), 3-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/44430383
Hole, A. (2018, September 17). Effective pedagogy for students with Specific Learning Difficulties. Retrieved from http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/2018/09/18/effective-pedagogy-for-students-with-specific-learning-difficulties/