This piece is part of a series by participants in the Summer 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.
Aline Van Neutgem is a PhD Student in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a Master’s degree in Administration from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. Her research experience includes work on cultural policy and social movements. Currently, her primary research interests lie in exploring comparative perspectives on gender-based violence in the U.S. and Latin America.
When I applied for the Open Knowledge Fellowship, I had one primary goal in mind: reducing the cost of education for my students. At Queens College, where I teach research skills in political science, I regularly encounter students who are deeply committed to their learning, yet struggling financially. For many, purchasing an expensive textbook can be the difference between participating fully in a class or falling behind from day one. Open Educational Resources (OER) seemed like a concrete and principled way to lower this first barrier: access.
The philosophy of open knowledge resonates with my broader approach to teaching and learning. Inspired by the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, my pedagogy centers on treating students not as passive recipients of information, but as co-creators of knowledge. Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education reminds us that real learning happens when students are invited to question, engage, and contribute. OER helps make this possible, not just because it reduces cost, but because it encourages democratization in knowledge production itself. I was pleased to learn during the fellowship about how researchers and educators engage in re-creating open texts through adaptation, translation, or combining with other sources, what is described as revising or remixing. Hearing other fellow’s experiences and approaches to teaching, I also found myself rethinking my methods and inspired to incorporate new dynamics in my classroom.
Kennedy, Amos. Know Justice Know Peace. 2020, letterpress. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Throughout the fellowship, we were encouraged to practice as we learned. Exploring OER in my discipline was both inspiring and, at times, challenging. On the one hand, I was pleased to find a range of solid, accessible textbooks that cover both qualitative and quantitative methods. However, many of these are written in a general social science framework, which means that examples often come from sociology, psychology, or economics rather than political science. This isn’t necessarily a drawback. In fact, I believe that the need to translate examples into political science contexts opens up space for students to think more critically about disciplinary boundaries and creates opportunities for discussion exercises in class.
One consistent gap I found was the lack of open materials specifically geared toward methods in comparative politics. This subfield, with its focus on cross-national case studies and diverse political systems, often relies on specialized texts that aren’t freely available. Despite the limitations, the process of searching itself became a learning moment. I was able to find some excellent journal articles with case studies that rely on comparative politics methods through open access repositories like the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I plan to build the discussion about these methods through a case-based approach in class. Some other valuable resources I discovered include the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and OER Commons, and the Library of Congress Collection Archives.
My biggest takeaway from the Fellowship is that open knowledge is not just a strategy, it’s a shift in perspective. It challenges us to rethink who knowledge is for, how it’s shared, and whose voices are included. For students, it means less stress over materials and more opportunities to engage critically. For instructors, it’s an invitation to collaborate across curriculums. Teaching at a CUNY campus, where many students come from diverse, working-class, and immigrant backgrounds, embracing OER is also a way of aligning our pedagogy with the values we claim to uphold: access, equity, and diversity. Next semester, I will incorporate OER in my syllabus, but also invite students to co-create mini case studies drawn from their own political interests and lived experiences.
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