One year ago today, Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures was published. The work of 70+ authors and artists, two-and-a-half years in the making (and many years in the imagining), and committed to open access and open practice, the book was published by Open Book Publishers in October 2023 and is freely available to all.
This post is a short story of the book’s journey into being, highlighting some of the continuing communities and related conversations, as well as an opportunity to thank the many people who have contributed to, encouraged, supported, and engaged with the book.
The idea for Higher Education for Good was born in mid-2021 during a conversation between myself and Laura Czerniewicz about all that was happening in our respective HE contexts after initial Covid lockdowns. Following several more Galway-Cape Town online conversations, we published a Call for Chapters in December 2021 as book co-editors. In the Call, we acknowledged the “existing pessimism and despair about higher education’s future” and invited elaboration of “glimmers of alternative futures”, especially those foregrounding “inclusion, equity, social justice, care and sustainability”. We were explicit in welcoming contributions in all genres: academic texts, speculative futures, dialogues, poetry, artwork. We were inspired and proud, less than two years later, to publish a book that is rich with all of these, working closely with authors and artists in 18 countries and dedicated peer-reviewers in several more.
Fittingly, for a book with contributors from across the globe, there were multiple book launches: online launches (thanks to Equity Unbound), an emotional book launch in Galway (thanks to Su-Ming Khoo), and many smaller, local events (including one for friends in my kitchen 🙂).
As anyone who has published a book knows, once a book is published it no longer belongs to its creator(s). It belongs to its readers. In its first year, we know that the book has been downloaded 9,667 times by people in over 90 countries, as well as being sold in print versions. This is truly beyond our wildest dreams, and we extend our thanks to all who have been interested enough to read and/or share one or more chapters in the book. The book has won two awards in 2024: the Best Edited Book Award from the Globalization and Education SIG (Comparative & International Education Society) and the Open Collaboration Award from Open Education Global. The latter was particularly gratifying, as it was awarded to all of the people involved in creating the book: authors, artists, peer-reviewers, and editors.
During the year, stimulating conversations in podcasts and webinars led to further conversations and thinking (thank you, Bonnie Stachowiak, Bryan Alexander, Rikke Toft Nørgård, David Mills, and Terry Greene). Equity Unbound invited several of the book’s authors to facilitate webinar conversations about their chapters. Authors also have been presenting their work in more fora than we know about…
As co-editors, we built on the “manifesto for higher education for good” (outlined in our introductory chapter) to explore current issues in open education in our joint keynote Open Education at a Crossroads at the OER24 Conference in Cork, and framed a call to action. Inspired by the responses, we facilitated a virtual interactive workshop at OpenEd24 earlier this month, which generated many more ideas, as well as a nascent community to develop them further. That conversation continues at this year’s OEGlobal24 Conference, where Paul Stacey is facilitating an asynchronous, online conversation Reimagining Open at the Crossroads, based on our OER24 call to action. Paul is inviting participation around a set of creative prompts – and all are welcome to join.
Finally, at the one year anniversary of publication, we are excited to say that the Higher Education for Good audiobook is about to be published, also by Open Book Publishers. It will be available on the book’s web page in the coming days. The audio version includes chapters that are read by authors as well as AI-voiced chapters (which we will blog about soon). Our deepest thanks to Terry Greene (of the award-winning Gettin’ Air podcast) who worked diligently with us and with authors over the past several months to create the AI-voiced chapters.
The book has been positively reviewed in several journals, the latest being an essay by critical activist-scholar Helen Beetham in Postdigital Science & Education, engaging deeply with the ideas and themes of higher education for good, exploring the postdigital, post-democratic, and the postcolonial good university.
Hope has been a byword for us throughout this project. Despite personal, local and global despair, we held hope in our hands and in our sights. The terrain of higher education continues to evolve rapidly, with new challenges as well as old/persistent ones. Yet, we’ve been inspired by all that has emerged through this project – not just a book, but a global community, conversations, and intersections with so many whom we are happy to learn from and with.
Speaking personally, I want to thank Laura Czerniewicz, my esteemed co-editor, generous scholar, and dear friend. We’ve often marveled that the tendrils of our work on this book are so intertwined that it is impossible to remember who wrote which word or phrase. In a time when so much academic (and other) labour is commodified and devalued, this collaboration has been a gift. Together, we thank the wonderful authors and artists who created and shared their work; the committed reviewers; our amazing copyeditor Larry Erhuvwuokhene Onokpite; Open Book Publishers; all of the book’s readers and sharers; our dear families, friends, and colleagues; and, as we wrote in the book’s Acknowledgements last year, “all those who gave us breath and give us hope… our foremothers who imagined and fought for the futures that are our present, our forebears in critical education and activism, all who imagine better futures for/on this precious planet, and all who work to create them.”
We leave the last word here to a kind and brilliant scholar, co-author of a chapter in the book, who sent us these most humbling words recently:
I am highly doubtful that this massive, distributed and care-full collaboration would have been possible without your masterful and thoughtful stewardship and immense patience. It was one of the most generous acts that I have encountered in all my years in academia. The hard copy sits on my desk this past year and it has been my go-to source. You two have restored hope in many of us.
Thank you, thank you.
…and onward.