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.

---

Mette Christiansen is a doctoral student in Political Theory at the Graduate Center. She draws on various traditions of Critical Theory, Black Political Thought, Marxist, and Aesthetic Theory to consider the school and pedagogy as sites of potential emancipation and as loci of social reproduction, political contestation, and subject formation.

---

My interest in the Open Knowledge Fellowship grew out of a longstanding concern with transformative pedagogy.  Early on in my teaching trajectory, I started straying from (and eventually leaving behind entirely) the conventional textbook as the main anchor point for study and learning.  By grounding course readings in para-conventional sources, and by offering students alternative zero-cost reading text- and media-based materials, I quickly realized that critical thinking and writing can be richly cultivated, in often unexpected ways, when students are given the chance to explore extra-institutional sources, and when they are invited to see that such sources are as vital as any object stamped with the imprimatur of a big-name academic publisher.

I started the Fellowship with only a vague idea of what “open access” and “open educational resources” (OER) entail.  After three mind-opening weeks, gracefully guided by expert librarians and Open Education scholars, I am equipped to delve deeper into the enormously expansive well of cost-free, readily (and legally) available and accessible study materials, and I look forward to continuing to build proficiency in weaving OER into my teaching and research, and to experimenting with the construction of syllabi and course sites on the CUNY Academic Commons (CAC) platform.  One of the things that excite me the most about CAC and OER is the prospect of getting students actively involved in co-creating shared educational resources.  I imagine that by inviting students into this space, and perhaps collaborating with them on remixing and modifying OER, they will feel newly empowered to assume voice and agency in their study, and get a tangible sense of what Jill Cirasella called “community-owned and values-driven” open access work.

As I was building my course syllabus for African American Political Thought, I realized how digging through different open access repositories helped me reconsider how to structure and teach the course.  I was pleasantly surprised to find several texts and scholars I was unfamiliar with, and was reminded of the richness of non-text based open sources, more of which I plan to integrate into my future courses as a way to further my pedagogical aspiration to make study as compellingly animated as possible.  In lieu of a recent anthology on African American Political Thought I intended to use, I found a critical review of it, and I think we can usefully engage this piece to both instruct us on the subject area and reflect critically on what an anthology can and cannot do, in terms of presenting a so-called “field of study.”  In my search for course materials, I  was also happy to see that there appears to be a concerted institutional effort to make freely available lots of (especially historical) resources.  Perhaps CUNY’s formal commitment to public education and knowledge in service of the public good can be bolstered by investing in a robust scholarly commons.

I firmly believe in and am committed to fostering opportunities for transformative networked and peer-based scholarship.  I feel convinced that a comprehensive and radical pedagogy relies on (the addition of) non-canonical and alternatively constellated work, and if virtual common spaces like the CAC can feed this kind of social and political commitment that is, to my mind, cause for celebration.  I hope to continue to do Commons-oriented work, perhaps create an OER textbook with a group of scholars from different disciplines, and explore the world of Manifold, another CUNY-based open-source platform whose social annotation feature promises a community-based approach to research of a kind we are too rarely afforded, in my experience, in the course of our education.