This paper investigates how to mitigate the conflict between OERs' openness and the principle of privacy when the open resources are student productions of a personal nature. It discusses one way to approach this issue in an Advanced French Composition class: have students write from the perspective of a self-inspired fictional character.
The Multiliteracies movement expands the understanding of 'texts' to any artefact that can be interpreted for meaning-making and encourages the use of non-standard texts in pedagogical practices (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015; The New London Group, 1996), making student-generated material a legitimate resource for teaching and learning (Blyth, 2017). Yet, how can we use student productions as OERs (Blyth, 2013) if they display personal content? This study discusses one way to mitigate the conflict between the openness of OERs and the principle of privacy when the open resources are student productions of a personal nature.
This project is based on the work done in a multiliteracies-inspired advanced French composition class at a large American university where composition and stylistics are approached from a sociolinguistic perspective: sociolinguistic concepts inform student productions as they develop L2 identities in French. Students' written productions for different genres-personal narrative, portrait, personal letter-as well as two metalinguistic reflections in English on their experience developing their L2 identities in French, and 'privacy questionnaires' constitute the data for this study. I will discuss how having students write from the perspective of a self-inspired fictional character allows for mitigation of the privacy issue. These outputs can then be used for pedagogical purposes in class and become part of an open archive. As part of an OER archive with The Texas Data Repository, they can be used as pedagogical material by other instructors, as data for researchers in applied linguistics, or as part of generative scholarship (Ayers, 2014).
