Abstract
Edited by Carl S. Blyth and Joshua J. Thoms, Open Education and Second Language Learning and Teaching: The Rise of a New Knowledge Ecology is a collection of studies that focuses on how Open Educational Resources (OER) are developed, selected and adapted by researchers and teachers, as well as the implementation of Open Educational Practices (OEP) within and beyond the classroom. What interests us most is that the editors of this book contextualize Open Education in second language (L2) teaching and learning through a historical overview of the movement, together with an in-depth exploration of how the open movement affects L2 education beyond the classroom context. Furthermore, they fill the research void by exploring aspects of open L2 teaching and learning across a range of educational contexts. Considering the constant economic and technological changes faced by the education system, along with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, as researchers and educators in L2 teaching and learning field, we believe OEP as a pedagogical approach to language teaching can facilitate teachers to better understand the development of students' agency and critical thinking skills, and foster inter-and intra-disciplinary collaborations.
This edited volume comprises three parts, focusing on the microsystem, mesosystem and exosystem of Open Education in L2 teaching and learning. The first part (Chapters 1–4) introduces the issues about L2 instructional environments at the microsystem level. To be more specific, the chapter authors describe, explain, explore and analyze Open Education design, development and implementation, OER as tools to teach and possible problems teachers may encounter in their practices.
The second part (Chapters 5–7) discusses the knowledge about L2 teacher education at the mesosystem level. The authors narrate and report their innovative practices of both pre-service and in-service L2 teachers in the Open Education movement in different teaching contexts. Specifically, the authors seek to answer questions about how teacher education should introduce Open Education to novice L2 teachers, and also explore what exactly pre-service L2 teachers need to know about OER and OEP to prepare for their future career.
The third part (Chapters 8–11) deals with developing practical knowledge in L2 teaching and learning at the exosystem level. The authors elaborate the relationship between the affordances and challenges of open-access journals, analyze L2 teachers’ tacit professional knowledge of OER, discuss Open Pedagogy, the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it, and make useful suggestions for L2 teachers to develop OER of their own. Those chapters are particularly useful for L2 teachers as the authors venture beyond the classroom and teacher education realms to explore how L2 educators develop their knowledge of Open Education through contact with colleagues and other information sources in the field at large.
The major contribution of this edited volume is that it increases its readers ' awareness of the importance of a new ecological knowledge imposed by the disruptive forces of openness. Specifically, pre-service and novice teachers can learn about the meaning of Open Pedagogy within the L2 teaching and learning field and its most updated research. In addition, L2 teachers can learn from each other's teaching success or failures and contribute their own to the new knowledge ecosystem, which has become a prominent feature of interconnectedness, dynamism and collaboration in the current existing Open Educational ecology. As a result, experienced L2 teachers and researchers can also benefit from the shared experiences and challenges to advance their teaching innovation and deepen their pedagogical research.
The second contribution of this book is that it demonstrates how OER can be used, reused, adapted, shared and modified to suit the specific needs to develop and conceptualize Open Pedagogy models in L2 educational contexts. This can greatly help enhance L2 teachers' beliefs of OER. As mentioned above, Open Pedagogy has emerged as an important teaching and learning practice while the current global Open Education resources movement has developed. This edited volume is the first academic work to systematically examine teacher perspectives on the impact of an Open Pedagogy approach implemented with the affordances and challenges brought by OER to teach L2. Apparently, with many L2 teachers moving to online instruction today, such work is becoming ever more important with the pedagogy of openness, and also is promoting social justice imperatives in L2 education.
The third contribution of this book is that it supports teacher professional development in Open Pedagogy practices. As is known to all, L2 teachers’ beliefs play a central role in the process of their professional development, and changes in their practices are the result of changes in their beliefs. Therefore, L2 teacher professional development programs should allow teachers to expand their knowledge base in OER and Open Pedagogy, paying special attention to how teachers teach rather than what they teach. This forward-thinking edited volume illustrates the enormous and transformative potential of Open Pedagogy as an evolving knowledge ecosystem; therefore, this book provides L2 teachers with an innovative and important framework for their professional development.
Finally, as an academic resource book for OER and OEP, this edited volume provides readers with a useful appendix of OEP repositories, articles/blogs/books/websites, about Open Education, Open Educational Institutions and Organizations, Open Tools and Platforms, and Open Journals (L2 Teaching and Learning), which can serve as a convenient and beneficial reservoir for L2 teachers and researchers to solicit useful additional information. The edited volume would be more comprehensive if it had discussed more examples about teaching L2 reading and writing at different school levels. Moreover, it would be more persuasive if it had added more teaching cases from less open regions and countries. All in all, we find this book most up-to-date, practical, well-organized and exceedingly useful for pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, postgraduates, researchers and Open Education administrators, and we would like to highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in how Open Education functions in L2 teaching and learning.
