OER22 Workshop - Applying the Capability Approach to Open Educational Practice
Channel: ALT
Date: 06/05/2022

Speakers: Gabi Witthaus and Catherine Cronin
This workshop is designed to be relevant to all OER22 participants who would like to reflect on their practice as open educators through a social justice lens, whether new to the Capability Approach or already familiar with it.

At a time when the focus on equity in higher education is more urgent than ever, many open education practitioners are working to expand the awareness and use of open educational practices to further both access and equity. The barriers to ‘opening’ higher education, however, are numerous, complex and continually evolving, from both within and outside the academy. Sharing approaches to embedding the use of OER and OEP is useful and necessary, but not sufficient. We require tools to assess and evaluate structural and cultural factors operating within HE institutions in order to design effective proposals and policies for change. The social justice-oriented Capability Approach is a theoretical framework that seeks to answer two fundamental questions: (i) What are people actually able to do and to be? (ii) What real opportunities are available to them? (Nussbaum, 2011; Robeyns & Morten, 2021; Sen, 1999). In this workshop, we will introduce the Capability Approach and explore how it can be used to analyse our own practices, as both critical practitioners and critical advocates of open education.

Suggested Outcomes:

An overview of the rationale and essential concepts of the Capability Approach;
Application of the Capability Approach to our own lived experiences as open educators;
Consideration of the role of personal and collective agency in fuelling our capabilities and promoting (or limiting) our individual wellbeing;
Option for each participant to develop a flowchart analysing their own practice as an open educator in capability terms;
Tentative answer(s) to the question: So what?
Workshop Format:

The online session will start with an invitation to participants to share their experiences of, or questions about, the Capability Approach. This will be followed by a brief presentation introducing the Capability Approach and how it has been used in development (Sen, 1999) and higher education contexts (Walker, 2006), outlining the key concepts of ‘capabilities’ and ‘functionings’. Participants will be invited to reflect on a key aspiration they have as open education practitioners and to identify enablers and constraints. We will share ideas in an open document and discuss them together. Following this, the workshop presenters will share how a Capability Flowchart (Witthaus, 2022) can be used to demonstrate interrelationships between capabilities, valued functionings, conversion factors, individual agency and possible outcomes.

We will end the session with a discussion about the potential value and impact of such an analysis. Participants will be invited to begin to create their own capability flowcharts during the workshop, using an openly available template, with the option to complete their flowcharts after the workshop and share these in an open folder, using a Twitter hashtag (#OER22_Capability) to continue the conversation.

We invite participants to bring paper and pens/ writing tools, so that they can draw their own maps as we go through the workshop.

Resources and References:

Cronin, C. (2022). Open Capabilities. Catherine Cronin’s Blog. http://catherinecronin.net/open/open-capabilities/
Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. New York: Harvard University Press
Robeyns, I., & Morten F. B. (2021). ‘The capability approach, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E.N. Zalta (Ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/capability-approach/
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walker, M. (2006). Higher Education Pedagogies: A Capabilities Approach. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill Education.
Witthaus, G. (2022). The capability approach Part 12: mapping journeys towards valued “beings and doings”. Art of E-Learning Blog. https://artofelearning.org/2022/03/16/the-capability-approach-part-12-mapping-journeys-towards-valued-beings-and-doings/
Theme: Open research