supporting individuals in navigating tensions
this statement speaks to me and challenges my educational, pedagogical practice as well. My ambition as a teacher would be to provide "tools" that allow students to accept tensions as part of the journey rather than "fix" that necessarily because I think the impossibility to soften all tensions may "hurt" them much more that becoming aware of them and stay/live with them.
Thus it is imperative to move beyond open-versus-closed dichotomies and even beyond unified conceptions of openness. Openness requires a critical approach.
I deem it crucial that the author is stressing the need of moving beyond dichotomies and that she reminds us of the role of critical thinking, which finds in me a big supporter. However, I'm starting to interrogate this word - "critical" - as it seems a schizophrenic concept, at least in Academia where it is both a "buzzword" and a "tabu".
The qualifier "open" is variously used to describe resources (the artefacts themselves as well as access to and usage of them), individual learning and teaching practices, institutional practices and policies, the use of educational technologies, and the values underlying educational endeavours
This passage is important in stressing the "ecological" feature of (open) education. It is made of an "assemblage" of various things, practices, actors, spaces/places (but I would add "time" - when things happen in different contexts at different time
not only of openness but also of hope, equality, and justice
This quote reminds me of bell hooks' foundational book "Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom" (1994). in particular when, in chapter 1, she says "To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin" (p. 13).
The use of open practices by learners and educators is complex, personal, and contextual; it is also continually negotiated.
This first sentence contains all key descriptors of "open practices", including "open" and "practices" themselves which are dense concepts. I find the second one (practices) very important in describing the performativity of education as a "doing", as a "process", as a "becoming-with-Others". "Open" is qualifying these "practices" and providing a sort of "direction" in how such practices should be performed to stay true to the principle of collaboration and openness.