We intend for our framework to support our local open education (OE), open educational resources (OER), and open pedagogy (OP) efforts at and beyond the University of Colorado Boulder by defining the values we wish to center, and realize as both ways of being and outcomes in this work. Additionally, we hope that it will help us convey these values in our open education communications and collaborations with others, including students, educators, administrators, and colleagues. Our framework is a work in progress and we are excited to invite your comment and critique.
At the highest level, the framework’s organization is rooted in Joan Tronto’s feminist democratic ethic of care and inspired by Tronto’s broad conceptualization of care as “an activity, a kind of practice” (Tronto, 2013). Attentiveness, Responsibility, Competence, Responsiveness, and Integrity are the values we prioritize. The first four of these are drawn from the ethical elements of care that Tronto (1993) identified as arising from four phases or steps in caring—caring about, caring for, care-giving, and care-receiving (Fisher and Tronto, 1990)—and we associate the fifth, Integrity, with the caring-with phase that Tronto added later (Tronto, 2013). We expand Attentiveness, Responsibility, Competence, Responsiveness, and Integrity in relationship with additional values, such as Empathy and Generosity, and give them shape and substance through examples of illustrative (past or continuing) and aspirational enactments.
References
Collier, A., & Ross, J. (2017). For whom, and for what? Not-yetness and thinking beyond open content.
Open Praxis, 9(1), 7-16. https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/406/371
Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. In E.K. Abel & M.K. Nelson (Eds.)
Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives (pp. 35-62). State University of New York Press.
Tronto, J.C. (1993). The practice of the ethic of care. In Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care (pp. 126-136). Routledge.
Tronto, J.C. (2013). Redefining democracy as settling disputes about care responsibilities. In Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice (pp. 17-45). New York University Press.
Attributions
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