OE Global 2019

This presentation reports on the establishment of an open pedagogy initiative between community organisations and students, facilitated by the Temple University Libraries (TUL) and faculty partners in the Philadelphia area. This project facilitates community organisations’ direction and autonomy in promoting beneficial research objectives. It also foregrounds students as the directors of their own knowledge output and learning.

CURE (the Community-University Research Exchange) produces community-driven social-justice research. The CURE team solicits research questions and project proposals from grassroots community organisations who experience social and economic marginalization limiting or even disallowing the access to information that is vital to innovating the services organisations provide. Community-directed research questions are made available for students to browse on a dedicated webpage. Students select from a bank of research projects, identifying issues that they wish to investigate, skillsets they hope to master, or organisations for who they hope to contribute their intellectual labour. CURE enables students to choose projects that are not only appropriate to their field(s) of study, but also relate to their personal commitments or interests, and to existing community engagements. Many students participating in CURE do so for their honours thesis, independent study, or term papers - all for credit.

Openness is both the social and political philosophy that grounds CURE and the framework that animates its practical applications. CURE is designed as a pedagogical tool that calls upon all project stakeholders to directly grapple with components of openness to reach a consensus towards reorienting the relationship between those who traditionally benefit from and those who are exploited in the course of producing knowledge.

In reporting on our experiences in establishing CURE at Temple University Libraries, we hope to share our successes and failures so that local organisations elsewhere can similarly partner with knowledge centres to establish CURE programmes of their own.