Our Mission
We are deeply committed to nurturing learning environments that are responsive to student need, that grow from a thoughtful consideration of both disciplinary context and the future of knowledge, and that amplify the impact of the academy on the public good. The Open CoLab is focused on:
The Open CoLab enacts its commitment to these engaged pedagogies in its approach to faculty and staff development as well: we actively seek to improve and transform traditional professional development methods and to grow and sustain new initiatives from inside Plymouth State’s community of practice.
Our Values
We are committed to a learner-centered approach to education that sees all members of a school — students, staff, faculty, administrators, parents, alumni, community members — as both learners and teachers. As we work alongside each other, we seek to uphold these values:
solidarity
We believe that no educational environment can flourish until all members of the community are adequately valued for the contributions they make.
community
We believe that our communities are our sources of strength and that serving communal needs will yield individual, institutional, and public benefits.
care
We believe that care work should be visible and supported in educational institutions;
equity
We believe that most educational environments emerged from deeply inequitable contexts and that we must actively confront such inequity via our pedagogy and course design.
trust
We believe in trusting our students, and in earning the trust of our students, colleagues, and the public in order to facilitate learning.
empowerment
We believe in intellectual and academic freedom, student agency, and the importance of every voice to the future of the knowledge commons.
openness
We believe that architectures for learning should promote sharing and collaboration while insisting on a social infrastructure that protects human dignity, privacy, and agency.
emergence
We believe that learning is a process, and that our values and plans should develop as our contexts shift and we learn together.