Open Education

Early Innovators

Some suggest that the beginning of the open education movement can be traced to 1967 when a [Page 677]parliamentary commission in Great Britain asserted the need for more child-centered educational practices, including open classroom structures. Also working at this time were psychologists such as Jean Piaget who argued for the importance of working through the interests of the child and structuring learning centers in the classroom.

John Bremer was one of the early architects of the open education concept. In Open Education: A Beginning (with Anne Bremer) and in The School Without Walls (with Michael Von Moschzisker), he provided descriptions of what it means to create an open classroom environment. He was the first director of the Parkway Program in Philadelphia, and he was one of the first persons to assert that the traditional American comprehensive high school had reached the limits of its functional and educational utility. Bremer wanted a new kind of school where education could be individualized and children's interests could be explored. His ideas gained popularity and were eventually copied in a number of major urban centers, including schools in Chicago and Los Angeles.

Structural Characteristics

Open education is also known by many as informal education. It typically is contrasted with traditional or formal educational models. Open education treated space and time as flexible and provided a wide range of activities to children. The child was the center of the educational process and the child had considerable power to shape and guide interactions with the teacher. Students select their own materials; teachers are guides in the instructional process and help by identifying student academic weaknesses or needs.

In the traditional classroom, by way of contrast, space is treated as fixed and time is highly routinized. The teacher identifies the topics and the content to be covered; students do not direct or shape the instructional process; they respond, instead, to the guidance and direction of the teacher. Much of the work is whole-group oriented, and in most cases all the students in the class are engaged in or doing the same kind of work.

In most cases, schools do not fit nicely into one of these two classroom structure models. Clearly there is an educational continuum, with some schools being prototypic of open education and others being very traditional and structured. In the middle of the continuum are wide ranges of classroom and school types where teacher direction varies and student-initiated educational activities are, at times, encouraged if not provided.

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