Following is the twelfth of a series of posts by participants in the Spring 2021 Open Pedagogy Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences in the Fellowship.

Cristina Pardo Porto (she/her) is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures. She is currently writing a dissertation on contemporary photographic practices from Central America and the Caribbean. Her research is grounded in archival work in Latin America and it has developed at the intersection of transhistorical reflection, literary and aesthetic theory (in particular of decolonial frameworks within affect theory and visual culture studies), and the history of photography. She teaches Spanish language and Hispanic cultures and literatures at Hunter College.

As part of the Spring 2021 cohort of the Open Pedagogy Fellowship of the Mina Rees Library, I have been able to consolidate my commitment to teaching in a public context in relation to the importance of open knowledge and the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). As a result of this fellowship, I am in the process of transforming my current Contemporary Spanish Literature in Translation (SPAN264) syllabus into a completely open access (OA) course using the CUNY Academic Commons. My goal is to prevent the economic barrier of high-cost materials from continuing to grow across CUNY, and to provide a zero-cost, active learning experience. As an instructor, I always try to foster a collaborative environment, where students’ voices, creativity and knowledge are the main focus of my classroom’s community. Nevertheless, this has certainly been a challenge.

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. Image by Miguel Gomez from Pixabay, used under the Pixabay license.

As a Fellow I have thought extensively on issues related to copyright and availability in regards to literary translation. My class studies contemporary literary texts from Spain (from 1939 to the present) from their English translations. My interest in learning about OA and OER comes from a concern that started with the pandemic. The students no longer have access to physical copies of translations, available–although scarce–in libraries. Since these are contemporary texts, they and their translations are still under copyright and are not available freely on the internet, the contrary of what Open Access means. Some improvised solutions that I have found have been, for example, scanning fragments of the texts, with the disadvantage that the students do not study the complete text; translating short texts such as poems from Spanish to English myself; or sharing .pdfs of translations that I have found and whose origin I don’t know. Neither of these methods is ideal nor does it completely fall within what is considered Open Access. During the three-week-long Fellowship, I have discovered resources such as Project Gutenberg, the Digital Public Library of America, and the Internet Archive. These digital, Open Access repositories have helped me tremendously. I have been able to find many of the items on my reading list. However, I am still in the process of solving the problem posed by more contemporary texts (from the 2000s).

 I believe that incorporating OER is fundamental to teaching literature and cultures in the contexts of their original production. In my classes, I use a wide array of media. To teach novels or poems, I use not only the texts, but also images and sounds, as well as secondary resources such as journal articles, encyclopedias or other types of documents from popular cultures, such as social media. Thanks to the Open Pedagogy Fellowship I have learned how to find and credit all of these kinds of materials. In the current times that we live in, OER and OA resources are critical in order to understand literature as a whole cultural phenomenon that happens in context.

Even though the challenges, I consider that the most important thing is to bring awareness to the subject of what open means in a broad sense and in relation to resources, access or knowledge. For this, I have decided to actively reflect with my students on the problems associated with availability and copyright, and that we face as researchers and students of contemporary cultures and literature in translation. While many of the resources that I will be working with will not be fully Open Access resources, I think that the key is to understand the current debates around all these issues and the importance of creating new shared spaces of knowledge and resources.

Class site: https://span264.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.