Opening Up Our Coursework and Coursebooks

This session on participatory teaching will explore collaborative and interactive ways for creating and employing open educational resources. Renren Yang will introduce his open-access UBC Wiki project, in which dozens of students contribute to creating encyclopaedic and updated entries on Keywords in Chinese Popular Culture. Samuel Beswick will introduce his open-access casebook and quizzes on Tort Law, online teaching resources that professors and students around the world can utilise and rework. We invite community members to come and discuss the opportunities and obstacles to designing and using OER projects.

Samuel Beswick is a private law scholar with primary research interests in the areas of torts, unjust enrichment, limitations, remedies and privacy. His current research concerns the temporal scope of judicial changes in the law. Does, and should, new “judge-made law” serve as precedent to past circumstances? He is also the editor of an open-access coursebook Tort Law: Cases and Commentaries (2021 CanLIIDocs 1859), which explores the law of civil wrongdoing through the themes of the rule of law (equality of officials and ordinary people under law) and comparativism (common law development through judicial conversations over time within and between jurisdictions).

Renren Yang researches 20th and 21st-century Chinese literature, film and popular culture, with a focus on the intersection between critical literary and media studies. His work centres on celebrity authorship, interface design, time-travel imagination and surveillance cinema in modern China.

Much of research and teaching is designed and determined by a small group of people who are located within academic institutions. It is ironic that accessing and engaging in academic knowledge is a privilege afforded to only a few, when the overall goal is that research and teaching should be transformative to all of society. Participatory research and teaching takes us a step closer to challenging the status quo by decentering the role of the academic expert and democratizing knowledge production.

How can we engage with students and community members in knowledge creation and dissemination? What role should learners and community members play in generating knowledge and research that informs curriculum and our understanding of the world? This series considers the practical and ethical aspects of community engagement as we research and teach matters of community interest. The organizers explore the intricacies of participatory research and teaching in a three-part series engaging researchers, community members and people with lived experience, with the goal to stimulate conversation and new ideas for research and teaching.

Series Conveners: Sam Beswick, Law, UBC; Kristen Haase, Nursing, UBC; Priti Narayan, Geography, UBC; Julia Schmidt, Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, UBC; and Renren Yang, Asian Studies, UBC