This is one of the reflections written by the Open Knowledge Fellows of the winter 2022 cohort. In these posts, Fellows share their insights 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.

Mike Rifino is a Ph.D. student in Developmental Psychology. Drawing on affect theories and feminist theories on emotions, he studies how structural inequalities promote shame, loneliness, and alienation within teacher-student relations in community college. Mike also examines the curriculum of undergraduate psychology education in which he investigates the dominance of the Euro-Western psychology canon. He currently teaches psychology courses at LaGuardia Community College.

When I was a LaGuardia Community College and Hunter College student, I experienced a heavy financial burden in acquiring an education during my CUNY undergraduate journey. These years were rewarding, yet they were particularly overwhelming for three interrelated reasons. One, the cost of required textbooks for my classes; two, paying out-of-state tuition for nearly two years; and three, a full-time schedule of remedial courses in writing, reading, and math. These issues contributed to the rising cost of being in college (remedial courses are costly and are not credit-bearing courses). They also posed a severe threat in delaying my time to complete my degree. This three-pronged situation compounded what was already an overwhelming college experience. I felt stressed about paying for college, ashamed of being in remedial courses, and anxious about making progress toward completing my degree. Once I acquired my bachelor’s degree in psychology and started my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, I was eager to begin teaching and to find ways to lessen the financial burden of being a college student in a university system that was once and should still be free to attend.

Before the Open Knowledge Fellowship, as an adjunct psychology lecturer, I struggled to find resources that could make my courses a zero-cost experience and introduce students to critical traditions in psychology that are typically excluded in mainstream psychology textbooks and curricula. My repertoire for implementing low or no-cost resources included providing PDF copies of the required textbook. I would also give a thorough tour of their library databases (e.g., PsycINFO), including Google Scholar, hoping that their familiarity with using Google services would pique their interest to use this additional tool. Lastly, I recently implemented a research paper assignment that encourages students to explore the Feminist Voices website, a multimedia database showcasing exhibits and archives on the diverse histories of feminist psychologies from the 20th century to the present. These tools are indispensable for aligning a low-cost course with a critical orientation toward psychology.

However, upon starting the Open Knowledge Fellowship, I realized these resources missed a valuable pedagogical opportunity to offer an explicit critique of how knowledge is typically presented and treated in typical undergraduate courses. This is especially relevant for psychology education, as research has consistently documented how its textbooks (and curricula) attempt to portray the production of psychological knowledge through a value-neutral lens. At the same time, it downplays seminal critiques on the many “contentious classics” in mainstream psychology. Moreover, these materials often represent psychology as a strictly Euro-Western, white, androcentric, and heterosexual tradition with little to no mention of psychologists or psychology subfields representing different perspectives, locations, and experiences (e.g., E. Kitch Childs, Ignacio Martín Baro, Naomi Weisstein, Frantz Fanon, etc.).

Participating in the Open Knowledge fellowship allowed me to acquire an expansive repertoire of OER and open access recourses. Searching for articles on open educational repositories such as the OpenLibrary Pressbooks, New York Public Library, and the Open Textbook Library, I was able to find texts that were accessible and that centered on the traditions in psychology that have historically been cast to the margins: intersectionality studies, the lived experiences of oppression and power, and research methods that embrace non-neutrality and social justice. Students in my class have engaged with these materials with interest and curiosity. I enjoy how these repositories and the articles we acquire from them serve as a basis for discussing how power and politics shape psychology as a discipline and how it shapes our psychology education (example). 

Indeed, our class discussions revolve around questions: Who benefits from charging money for textbooks? Why aren’t the topics covered in these OER materials not covered in the textbooks we are required to purchase for our other psychology courses? Who decides what tradition(s) of psychology should be admitted in these textbooks?

This Fellowship provided me with the support and resources needed to transform how I conceive and construct my syllabus. Initially, my syllabus emulated a business-like contract saturated with technical language and punitive assessment practices. Through this Fellowship, I shifted this perspective and transformed my syllabus into a living document that encourages, rather than shuns, the imaginative possibilities that students bring to the classroom.

Recognizing the diverse ways students produce knowledge was also made explicit using the WordPress course site, which we used as a space for students to reflect on what they were learning in and outside of class. This allowed us to make learning not only visible but also shared. Put briefly, acquiring such a deep set of OER tools and resources addressed my three key pedagogical concerns for teaching psychology, which included providing free materials, centering critical disciplinary knowledge, and exploring critical views on knowledge production.

 As an Open Knowledge Fellow, my ethical and political commitments to CUNY pedagogy have deeply expanded in three key dimensions. One, I feel confident in my knowledge and experience in implementing OER and open access resources in my classes and my research. These materials are not only critically orientated but are also free to acquire. Two, this fellowship allowed me to connect with my GC peers about our shared but also unique challenges in shaping spaces in the classroom that can potentially serve for equity and access. This is not just what a public university ought to center: it is what the legacy of CUNY and its student-led activism has achieved and continues to strive for. 

Last but certainly not least, from this Fellowship, I walk away with a deeper appreciation of librarianship as a radical force for institutional change. This program’s guest speakers and facilitators all represented shared yet unique commitments to shaping their profession toward social transformation. This is a crucial lesson to embrace that educational change is not limited to the classroom solely between faculty and students. As I recall, CUNY libraries served as one of the first concrete demonstrations of CUNY solidarity that I had come across as an undergraduate. As a CUNY undergraduate, I knew that Hunter College and LaGuardia Community College were connected via the CUNY system. However, my relationship with the interconnections of CUNY colleges felt quite abstract to me. Only when a librarian taught me how to use the Interlibrary Loan system did I gradually begin to achieve a sense of CUNY solidarity. I fondly remember requesting books for me to pick up at various CUNY campuses, far and nearby, just as an excuse to visit their campus and breathe in their unique yet connected CUNY campus culture. I look forward to continuing my use of OER resources and linking these crucial materials to how we can strengthen our bonds both within and beyond the classroom.

Image by Mateusz Łapsa-Malawski via Flickr, under CC 2.0 license.

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