Exploring our Open Educational Practices in Support of Excellence in Graduate Education: A Collaborative Autoethnography

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of our exploration of our open educational practices (OEP) with graduate students. As reflective practitioners, we used a self-study methodology and collaborative autoethnographic methods to interrogate our open approaches to teaching and supervision. We draw on our developing competencies to support the wisdom, critical thinking, resilience, and adaptability of our graduate students. The article extends preliminary findings about graduate education and open practices in relation to and emerging from earlier work (Ives et al., 2022), which committed us to further exploration of our practices. Using our definition of OEP which expands on the work of several open scholars, we report new findings from our in-depth collaborative analysis of data collected over two years. We found a gap in the literature examining the use of OEP with graduate students. Findings include OEP and their alignment with our values and competencies, as well as OEP within our teaching, course design, and graduate supervisory practices. We offer insights into the outcomes of our practices for students and ourselves, and ways we can improve.