2.3 Methodology
2.3.5 Sample Description and Study Limits
2.3.5 Sample Description and Study Limits
As noted earlier, this sample is skewed towards those who are actively engaging in open learning and in a sense succeeding. This study was not designed to measure failures or people who were frustrated with open learning and the reader should keep this limitation in mind throughout. A person could more easily
disappear from a learning environment online where they could lurk anonymously than they could in a traditional educational setting. While I was able to capture some
“failures” through offline fieldwork (people who walked out or expressed disgust) and later in the study asked a few respondents to more directly discuss experiences they had observing these failures, there is little in my data to capture who is not
21 Two undergraduate research assistants helped code these transcripts.
doing open learning and why. Participants were asked to comment whether or not they thought open learning was for everyone and that question produced some of the exclusive aspects of open learning that were taken-‐for-‐granted. Mostly though, exclusion had to be inferred and analyzed in the subtle ways norms and behaviors produced that exclusion.
In my sample, participants engage in entrepreneurialism, which I will discuss more in chapter 3. McMillan Cottom (2017) describes the entrepreneurial worker as someone who is always looking for the next opportunity through networking and continuing education. She argues that the entrepreneurial worker is a product of labor market precarity (Standing, 2011), declining job tenure for younger workers (Hipple and Sok, 2013), and a risk shift from institutions to individuals (Hacker, 2006) (McMillan Cottom, 2017). The entrepreneurial worker believes that the only way to fully escape bad labor market conditions is to become your own boss (McMillan Cottom, 2017). In the next chapter, I analyze participants’ experiences with the financial crisis and recession and discuss how that relates to their open learning. Twenty-six of the 34 participants experienced some form of precariousness following the crisis and recession, and I will contextualize in the next chapter how “experiencing precariousness” is defined. For now though, it is important to understand that a large portion of my participants were attracted to entrepreneurialism in open learning and behaved similarly to McMillan Cottom’s (2017) definition of the entrepreneurial worker.
This attraction to entrepreneurialism in my sample is a potential limit, in that not all open learners are likely to have an affinity for entrepreneurialism. However, like MacMillan Cottom (2017) argues, entrepreneurialism within my sample was a kind of
choice made within a structure that shifted risk from institutions to individuals (chapter 3). As I will argue in chapter 4, entrepreneurialism was part of the pedagogic discourse, and therefore non-entrepreneurial open learners were unlikely to succeed in their
learning. My participants embraced the risk shift (chapter 5) and their rationales resemble what is called the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron, 1995). The
Californian Ideology “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies” into a “virtual class” and achieves a “profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies” (Barbrook and Cameron, 1995). The Californian Ideology is a critique of Turner’s (2006) New
Communalists discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
Responding to these critical views of the “Californian Ideology”, Pearce argues that one thing holding together the structure of livelihood in the virtual class is a faith in
“autodidactic communalism” (1996). Autodidactic communalism is the process by which the virtual class self-teaches and learns “by showing each other how to do things”
(Pearce, 1996). My participants engage in autodidactic communalism and this is the focus of chapter 4. The additional eight participants who did not experience precariousness are especially committed to autodidactic communalism and as such are responsible for defining the dominant behaviors within my study (chapter 5). Through autodidactic communalism, precarious learners could learn and share in a way that let their
experiences count. Thus, while they behaved very similarly to the McMillan Cottom’s (2017) definition of an entrepreneurial worker, they were able to at least temporarily escape the dominance of a precarious labor market by learning to learn and learning to belong.
McMillan Cottom (2014) offers a critique of open education that must also be addressed as I describe and discuss the limits of my sample: open education serves the “roaming autodidact.” The roaming autodidact is a “self-‐motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets” (McMillan Cottom, 2014). Roaming autodidacts are typically well off white men who already benefit most in current labor markets and who are also privileged in the tech space (ibid). I would not go so far as to say that my participants, even the white men, are completely disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets. However, there is an overwhelming sense of colorblindness22 in my sample at times and the lack of racial diversity in my
sample gives me little room to theorize much else than how white people experience open learning. At times, this is subtle, like in Molly’s story of giving her labor in exchange for food and housing in the introductory chapter. We can praise Molly’s ecological choice to live simply and engage in organic farming for a year, but we must also be aware of the ways that Molly’s decision to forego accumulation of her own property and wealth in pursuit of skills is white privilege. As a white person, Molly is not required to answer to a history of black and brown disenfranchisement in her choices and non-‐choices, especially through property ownership. Without a diverse sample, I am left to constantly ask, “could anyone do this?” even when my participants are reluctant to do so. In chapter 5, I will explore this further and discuss how this limitation plays out when analyzing how participants learn-‐to-‐
belong.
22 See also Schor et al (2016) for a discussion of colorblindness in a portion of my sample as well as other case studies from the Connected Economy team.
One final note on limitations in my study, and that is the “momentariness” of this study. My research was conducted during the boom of open education sites in the United States. Since then, many of those sites have changed in terms of what content they offer and what they charge for that content. While some free and low cost options remain, more high cost options are emerging in the open education space. One major shift is the emergence of short-‐term coding bootcamps that are offered for anything from a few thousand to $30000. McMillan Cottom (2017), from observations conducted in 2014, discusses these at the end of her study as a new form of credentialism and thus Lower Ed. The openness of these bootcamps is more in question than the loosely open practices that were included in my study, and thus the level of inclusivity and who can succeed through open learning is also thrown into question. I will address this more in the conclusion, but it is important to note that the timing of my study greatly contributes to my conclusions.