This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2025 Open Knowledge 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 teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Photo by E.Q. Kreitzberg

Yael Horowitz is a scholar-practitioner of Yiddish Theatre and friendship as a site of cultural transmission. She is working on her PhD in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center.

I wanted to be an Open Knowledge Fellow because I learned at an early age from my librarian mother how crucial access to information and research literacy can be. I remember learning in 5th grade how to use search terms and keywords to hone in on what I was looking for, I remember the process of developing a question and then being able to accurately find the answer. As an educator, I have seen how empowering it can be to guide students through a process of honing in on what they are authentically interested in and being supported by knowledge and resources in that pursuit.

My experience as an Open Knowledge Fellow was twofold. I felt as if I was gaining insight and skills both as an educator and as a knowledge worker/writer/scholar. The presentations at the start of the fellowship sessions really clearly laid out the power and economic dynamics of academic publishing. It encouraged me to reflect on my future published prospects and what kinds of ethical choices I want to be making with my scholarship. I feel as if now I at least know my options more to be able to make informed and empowered decisions that align with my own ethical framework for scholarship. As an educator, it got me to think critically about the resources my students need both as scholars and more holistically. I thought a lot about how difficult it is to access trustworthy information and the way that I can use my class and syllabus to not only teach about the history of theatre but also about information literacy, research skills, and critical analysis processes.

One of the main challenges of building a theatre course using primarily Open Access materials is that often the texts of plays that we use most are under copyright. Even if the play itself is from antiquity, certain translations of it are still under copyright. This shifted how I built my course. Instead of looking for a specific play that was Open Access (which proved to be unfruitful), I broadened my search to start with what was Open Access. Normally I do not teach Alcestis by Euripides, but because I found a really strong resource I decided to include that play instead of say, The Bacchae. This also led me to learn Alcestis better than I would have otherwise, and so in using these resources I also deepened my own knowledge.

Grand Theatre in Manhattan, circa 1904, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Further along in the process of creating the course site I began thinking of my own site as an Open Educational Resource with its own set of resources and activities to offer. Accordingly, I added a page for activities and wrote out very simple instructions for different interactive activities that students can do that goes along with the syllabus.

As the program went on it became increasingly clear to me how salient access to knowledge and information is in our current political climate. Access is a political issue. Democratization of and autonomy over knowledge sources is  a political issue. We were learning about public domain government resources, as we were seeing, almost in real time, these resources be censored and taken down. We were participating in the fellowship as we were adjusting to a reality of increased misinformation, totalitarian control of narratives, and denial of basic forms of knowledge production and proliferation. Being able to have space and time to further develop critical information literacy and find alternative access points to that information felt really important. I hope that I am able to now also pass that experience along to my students, to empower them to seek out the knowledge they are looking for that IS out there. And as a scholar, I hope to be able to contribute to the networks of resources that are out there because they are only as strong as we make them.

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