Why?

Why Open Hand?

Higher education is currently beset by many daunting challenges, including:

Teacher Burnout
Student Retention
Student Disengagement
Issues of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Emerging technologies with unknown impacts

Open Hand addresses these challenges by promoting...

Co-Creation

We see faculty and students in a reciprocal relationship, creating unique connections to content and learning that can only happen together. This relationship-rich approach is vibrant and alive because students have a voice in exploring what matters to them.

Integration

Faculty and students are invited to engage and explore using the full spectrum of their social, emotional, spiritual, personal, and professional interests. They cultivate curiosity and wonder about life experiences and real-world challenges while investigating deeper questions about meaning, purpose, and values.

Inclusion:

Faculty and students grow together, developing active listening skills. They build learning communities together, questioning cultural assumptions, considering social justice issues, and enacting social change.

Experience

Instead of focusing on conceptual knowledge alone, faculty and students are actively immersed in the affective nature of learning. An experience produces a feeling, often through hands-on activities and embodied participation. Constantly sitting in seats can be tiring, but when a class moves together by doing, experimenting, and applying, they gain concentration and motivation.

The human hand gives and receives, creates and probes, shapes and builds. An extension of embodied existence, the hand plays an integral role in learning, self-awareness, and lived experience. Just as a tool is a seamless extension of a hand, learning experience design is an extension of the educator's embodied knowledge and discipline.

With our Open Hand model, teachers and students employ both body and mind for a more thorough embrace of experience. In this way, they produce deep learning together.

Learning experience takes all hands.

Research has consistently shown that collaborative learning significantly impacts student engagement, attitudes, persistence, and personal development.

In a summary of more than 2,500 publications, results showed that "students not only make statistically significant gains in factual knowledge and in a range of general cognitive and intellectual skills, they also change on a broad array of values, attitudinal, psycho-social, and moral dimensions."

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