Following is the third in a series by participants in the Winter 2022 Open Pedagogy Fellowship (which will be known, going forward, as the Open Knowledge Fellowship), coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY. 

Alexander Legg is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center. He holds a master’s in clinical psychology from the American University of Beirut. His research examines coercive control, intimate partner violence, and sex-trafficking victimization in LGBTQ+ communities. He teaches PSYC 784: Gender, Sex, & Sexuality at John Jay.

I was eager to participate in the CUNY Open Knowledge Fellowship for several reasons. First, as an undergraduate and later as a graduate student, I have spent a large and unnecessary amount of money on textbooks that now collect dust on my bookshelf. I will probably never open these books again, and while they were useful for a class at one point, they have unfortunately not served my personal learning beyond a 15-week semester. As a current adjunct instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, I work with students who express having had similar experiences. Relatedly, on a personal level, I don’t believe that access to educational materials should live behind paywalls: I believe that my teaching style and syllabus should reflect the social-justice orientation of the City University of New York and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 

Psychology, as a discipline, is particularly guilty when it comes to setting up roadblocks between students and their access to educational materials. These roadblocks often look like paywalls and subscription fees. In my view, the American Psychological Association, among other big names in the world of academic publishing, has done little to promote or ensure equitable access to learning materials. Through the Open Knowledge Fellowship and help of the CUNY Graduate Center Librarians, I attempted to construct a syllabus that reacts to these gate-keeping practices.

Upon starting out, I was skeptical that I could fully construct a syllabus using only open-access resources. Since the class I am teaching is a bit of a niche area, the intersection of forensic psychology and gender studies, I thought there were some purchased texts that I would not be able to let go. I was pleased to find that there were many open-access academic articles that addressed the topics I aimed to teach in class each week. I found these materials through websites like the John Jay Special Collections, New York Public Library, and OpenLibrary Pressbooks. I also found resources to use in the classroom like YouTube videos, podcasts, news articles, and other forms of media.

Although research articles are valuable, I believe that students spend enough time being assigned and consuming such research articles, and not enough time engaging with other forms of learning and art. As a student, I’ve only been in a few psychology classes where a professor has encouraged me to look toward poetry, art, theater, and philosophy to better understand psychology. In these rare classes I felt that I learned the best. In the class I teach now on Gender, Sex, & Sexuality I encourage students to look beyond the traditional academic articles. So far, students responded well, and for our weekly class discussions we have been looking at different art pieces, news articles, and YouTube videos in an effort to teach beyond the classroom. 

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the Fellowship was learning about the archival materials. For this class, I draw on many clinical case examples to teach about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the criminal and legal systems. I was excited to find archival sources through the John Jay Special Collections and New York Public Library that contained related clinical studies. For example, through the John Jay Special Collections, I was able to locate a digitized historical archive of transcripts of court cases that dealt with sex trafficking. I looked at these transcripts with students in the class to examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the criminal and legal systems. The added benefit of using these transcripts was that we could examine these issues from a historical perspective as well. 

The main takeaways from the fellowship was the realization that courses can and should be taught using a majority of open access materials. Students not only appreciate this, as it helps them save money, but using open access materials also helps to inspire creativity on the part of faculty and students to engage in learning beyond the class. I believe that this style of teaching and learning is more beneficial than learning from a textbook students are required to purchase for one semester only. A course designed around open-source knowledge allows students to engage and interact with materials related to the class outside of the words printed in a textbook.

Photo: “Happy Gay Pride?” by A. Davey, shared on Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license 

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