Open Faculty Patchbook

I really love how new forms of open-access publishing online is inspiring faculty to create new forms of publications for pedagogy scholarship. Just because I happen to know a lot of people (including Maha) doesn’t negate the fact that I love the Open Faculty Patchbook: A Community Quilt of Pedagogy.

From the description:

Fleming College faculty and our peers around the world are building a community patchwork of ‘chapters’ into a quasi-textbook about pedagogy for teaching & learning in college. Each patch of the quilt/chapter of the book (let’s call it a patchbook) will focus on one pedagogical skill and be completed and published by an individual faculty member.

These patches are deeply personal as well as practical, and it’s refreshing to read from new voices from underrepresented colleges within the literature (in other words, anyone who isn’t an Ivy, a fancy SLAC, or the usual suspects of R1 institutions). I also appreciate that while it is largely faculty and staff from Flemming College, addressing a complaint faculty often have that they have trouble applying what they read to the “local” community, while incorporating a variety of outside voices to introduce different perspectives and points-of-view.

They are also inviting the contribution of more “patches” for future patchbooks, and hopefully this can become a sustainable series and approach to writing about pedagogy in highered.

Image by Steve Snodgrass licensed CC-BY 2.0