In the preceding semester, I developed a unit of Open Education Resources (OER) addressing social contract theory. These resources were designed for PS 201 Political Theory, an introductory course on the “big ideas” in theory. The course was entirely no-cost to the student, as I used a combination of self-developed OER and article PDFs.
This approach meant that I had to do a fair amount of conceptual scaffolding for the students both at the outset as well as over the course of the semester. Developing the course material pushed me to think about course design in ways that I had never considered, and it forced me to think more about my subjective decisions as the course designer. Using the open licensed resources at Project Gutenberg, I developed ten reading excerpts with study questions and reading guides. These materials replaced a more traditional reader-style textbook that introduces students to major themes in political thought without making them read the original texts. I learned this material by reading the original text, but I have noticed that this approach has been sidelined in favor of more general summaries at the introductory level.
Sticking to the original texts forced us to go slowly at times, and I think I could have budgeted more time in the syllabus for moving through the material more deliberately. The students seemed to really enjoy reading the original texts. In class, we often conducted line-by-line readings of the readings, which I think helped students navigate them with greater ease. I assigned each student to a reading and asked them to serve as “discussion leader” for one of the course’s topics. Because they did not have the ancillary materials associated with a traditional textbook, I think the students felt both confident in diving deeply and trepidatious that they weren’t analyzing the work “correctly.” This trepidation proved to be a difficult concern to assuage because theory invites subjective readings. As the instructor, I occasionally found myself having to feed the discussion leader a more accurate analysis, especially with Hobbes.
My sense is that a costed textbook that summarizes the original text gives students less space to flub the interpretation, but it also gives them less incentive to make sense of the material on their own terms. In this fairly irreconcilable conundrum, I come down firmly on the side of giving the students more imaginative space, even if it requires occasional corrections on my part. This project forced me to confront my own attitude toward the canon of “western” political thought.
A drawback to my approach, and an issue I continue to struggle with, is whether assigning the trifecta of Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau does enough to destabilize the canon. I learned this way, and I do think it is important to know the ideas before you are able to meaningfully critique them. However, I am also inspired by scholars who push past these ideas in an effort to decolonize knowledge production. I found that teaching the social contract at the outset had the potential to confirm student bias in favor of uninterrogated principles like “freedom” and “equality.” To address this concern, the entire final unit in the class was about justice and how thinkers have critiqued the western canon as exclusionary. On their exams, students were asked to reflect on the usefulness and limitations of the social contract as a theoretical device. Many used the readings on justice to critique the thought of Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau, which indicates a thoughtful engagement with these ideas. I doubt students would have felt so confident to critique these thinkers directly had they not read them in their own words. I conducted a survey of student opinion on the OER at the end of the unit on the social contract. I still need to analyze that data (and will share my results with the OER team when I do). A cursory reading of the results indicated that students liked the reading excerpts, found them engaging, and thought they helped improve their comprehension of these theorists. Most students said that they would consider low-cost options in classes in the future.
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