Sharing is caring: hidden barriers to being open
Even before I came to work for the University of Manchester Library I had always known they were advocates of ‘open’. The hugely successful, and award winning, My Learning Essentials (MLE) online skills programme was well known, and well respected, in higher education library teaching and information literacy (IL) circles in which I was involved. Launched in 2013, the resource was fantastic, and in my opinion, at the time, was one that many other higher education libraries, including the one I was working in, (and even further education libraries) would have liked to have the expertise and resource to create. But many don’t. So the fact that The University of Manchester Library had made the resource completely open and available for reuse under Creative Commons licences, was a godsend for many librarians and learning developers. It wasn’t just the student resources themselves that were openly available, but all workshop plans, slides, handouts and source code were open and available on Jorum (since superseded). Meaning anyone involved in IL or academic skills teaching could Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute them. “Really?! Wow! How amazing!” I remember this being my reaction back when MLE launched and thinking this was a really significant moment for HE libraries, IL and open educational resources (OERs).
Fast forward a few years and I am now a member of the team that creates, develops and delivers the My Learning Essentials programme. It was therefore no great surprise then that as part of a review of our Embedded training programme we decided to make the session plans and slides open so that they could be viewed and used by anyone. This is, after all, what we do. As a teaching librarian, I have both used, and shared, open education resources and practices in different areas of my work. But did the idea of everyone’s personal session slides and plans being out there for anyone to possibly comment on, or critique, sit well with all staff? ls everyone comfortable with it? Does it create a sense of uneasiness for some and perhaps a sense of exposure that I hadn’t really expected or considered before? It got me thinking about impostor syndrome (IS)and in our quest to be open, how the open knowledge agenda might affect those who experience IS.
People might wonder why someone who teaches might have feelings of anxiety over having work made publicly available. After all, it isn’t like standing up in front of a class of people talking to them, which Maloy suggests is actually something teachers with impostor syndrome often wrestle with. All of us in our team do that as a day job. We teach. We put ourselves out there and expose ourselves on a daily basis. A search on the subject of impostor syndrome in academia throws up surprising results that seems to indicate that most of academia is suffering from it. There are numerous accounts of academics, teachers and researchers all experiencing feelings of inferiority and of not being good enough.
So why would someone potentially feel more vulnerable having their work put online? The answers to this are not simple. There may be complex reasons that a person feels anxious about having their work made openly available, one key difference is that there is a permanence to it, more specifically a permanent presence, that often doesn’t exist when you teach. Even though with some teaching our sessions are captured for access by selected groups, having work available openly, all the time, to everyone, may feel more daunting.
Weller acknowledges that there are a number disadvantages to open. Some of which, such as identity issues and unpredictability, could be a cause of anxiety for many whether someone has impostor syndrome or not. The potential for negative comments, or unintended outcomes might play on the mind of individuals already suffering from lack of confidence.
So what can we do about it?
The library and IL community has always been a caring, sharing community supporting many of Weller’s advantages of open. Back when MLE launched there were (and still are) many instances of open and shared IL resources and could be argued in some cases that the driver for sharing wasn’t rooted in the open movement per se, but was that is more akin to Wenger’s community of practice — a supportive and cooperative relationship to help one another. It was perhaps more by way of a happy accident, that our ethos of sharing fits perfectly into the open knowledge agenda.
By collaborating and working together and working in supportive space we can provide a sense of community to help others feel confident in their abilities and their expertise. In her article on Attributes of Open Pedagogy, Bronwyn Hegarty introduces us to key attributes for open pedagogy. In Attribute 4: Sharing Ideas and Resources, Hegarty describes how she has come across many teachers expressing insecurities about not wanting their work to be judged or that it isn’t good enough. She points out that when making open content, sharing knowledge and ideas and asking for help can play a key role in helping to to build confidence and overcome such anxieties.
As part of sharing, the implementation of a rigorous QA process for all content and having joint ownership is also something that can help to alleviate feelings of impostor syndrome. This is something we have also done in our team and although not an easy process, the long term benefits to the team and to our content, far outweigh any negatives.
Although there may be open policies in place in many HE institutes, and we might be encouraged to be open in our own practice, developing a sense of community and a system for support should be created alongside these policies for staff who face barriers, not necessarily the obvious barriers we know about, but those that might be hidden from view.
