Making Books Open Access: Interview series 1
Using KURA’s program to convert foreign-language books open access, more than 40 books/book chapters were made open access. In our interviews with researchers who used this program, we asked about the purpose and benefit of doing so.
Ph.D. (Psychology), Massey University, New Zealand. Assumed his current position in 2014 after serving as a professor at Center for English Language Education in Science and Engineering, Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering. Specialized in educational psychology, his research topics include effective learning and teaching strategies, critical thinking, metacognition, and other thinking skills, and cultivation of 21st Century competencies. In addition to the open-access book discussed in this interview, his major publications include Promoting Spontaneous Use of Learning and Reasoning Strategies (Routledge, 2017, Joint Author and Editor).
[Websites]
Activity Database on Education and Research, Kyoto University
Researchmap
Homepage
Prof. Manalo’s Deeper Learning, Dialogic Learning, and Critical Thinking was made open access in the 2020 academic year. The Kindle version of the book is also available on Amazon.
■Bridging educational research and teachers
——I would like to first touch upon the book itself, Deeper Learning, Dialogic Learning, and Critical Thinking. The book is trying to promote skills and competencies that are important for young people and children to survive in the 21st century. The purpose of the book, described in the introduction, is to “bridg[e] the gap or disconnection between what educational researchers are finding in their studies and the guidance/materials being provided to teachers about the cultivation of crucial student capabilities.” So there is a gap.
Manalo: A huge gap.
——Then the book is trying to fill that gap?
Manalo: Yes. It’s only a small attempt, but I’d like to start a trend of getting educational researchers to bridge that gap, so that what we know from research and what we are making available to teachers are closer to each other.
One of the things that I did when I was editing this book was to make sure that the authors simplify the language without dumbing it down. I said to the authors, “Imagine a graduate research student or a teacher you know, who is teaching at a school or at a university and not an expert in your area, but should understand what is in your chapter. Then that is who you should be aiming for.”
■To be more effective in teaching
——What is the current situation of teaching?
Manalo: You only need to go to any teacher-training course or program to realize that the focus is still to teach the teachers how to teach subjects so that the teacher can pass on knowledge to the students. Then teachers teach the students mathematics or science and to test them whether or not they can remember what they have been taught. We are still operating on the idea that the information is in books that are stored in libraries and we have to hold it in our head to make sure that we can use the knowledge. But now it’s in our smartphones.
——Technologies and societies have changed, so we have to change the focus of education.
Manalo: We don’t have to memorize everything. Instead we should know how to find and use the knowledge. Of course, we cannot teach or learn in the absence of content. The content is important, but just as important is the ability to use that content, critically think about what they have learned and consider how important it is in their life. If we don’t know how to do those things, we can’t use those very effectively in work or even in our personal life.
I think that is part of the problem with the pandemic. There is so much misinformation and people are believing the misinformation out there. It is so easy to dupe people because they don’t think critically about what they are learning or don’t make connections about the different pieces of information that should be connected. We should think, for example, “This person said this and this, and they are contradictory, so should I believe that person in this instance?” It’s basically a fundamental subject in everyone’s life.
——It is often said that critical thinking is important.
Manalo: The curriculum says that these things are important, but the teachers’ skills are not congruent with that. This is a fundamental problem in education at the moment and we have a responsibility as educators to change the current situation. Some teachers do that well despite their training, but the important point is that we should be doing that more systematically in our education.
Our book tells you how to be more effective in teaching so that teaching is better aligned to objectives of 21st-century education. It’s definitely not the end of it and we are continuing the work on this, but what we have already put in here is really useful if people apply some of the strategies or methods to how they teach or conduct their classroom instruction. It’s difficult to change by yourself but if you can contribute in some small way towards changing that, I think that’s already good.
■Sharing good educational strategies
——There is another important purpose of the publication that you mentioned in the introduction, which is to “convey the value of sharing strategies—so that we are learning from each other for the purposes of developing and enhancing classroom practices.”
Manalo: Sharing is important, especially in education. There is a tendency for researchers to publish their work but not make it accessible to teachers. Some teachers are doing really wonderful work in school and improving the achievement of students, but we don’t always have access to that as researchers. The gap is a problem. When I visited New Zealand last time, almost two years ago, one of my research collaborators there introduced me to a school and I had a look. The school is in a poor area but they are doing extremely well because of the teachers’ approach to their teaching and how they relate to students. The students are being given autonomy. They are able to make decisions in the classroom. In the class, the teachers would bring them together and say, “Okay, I’d like you to work on this,” and will illustrate or show something. After that, the teacher gets them to work. All of the students have laptops so they can move around. They got some funding, a little bit more money, for this from the government because they are doing quite well. Some students are working in threes, some are on their own, some are working on tables, and some are sprawled on the floor—but they are actually motivated and learning.
The teachers collaborate with each other. For example, two teachers who may have students, say 25 students in each class, teach the students together. The students can also mix with each other and learn from each other. The teachers are moving around checking, “How are you doing here?” If they are stuck on something or doing something that is not quite right, then the teacher can immediately address that problem with them. This is why it is working and why the students are achieving.
On Friday afternoons, the students don’t have any scheduled classes. They can do whatever they want and they can present ideas to the teachers. One thing that they showed us was that the students created an area as a kind of resting area but also with some play equipment outside in the school grounds. Another one, which was done a couple of years before I visited, was connecting two buildings together. The students had to get builders to make it, but they designed it. In New Zealand, especially in the winter, it’s raining every day at some point, which is problematic for the students and teachers to be running from one building to another. That connection is functional and works quite well, providing a solution to that problem for them.
The students are learning and achieving really well because they are doing things that they are interested in and have scope to apply what they are learning. The teachers should be able to share that with other teachers and also with us researchers.
■Having a range of strategies
——Not special teachers’ abilities, but strategies that can be shared. The strategy here pretty much matches your idea of curricular space.
Manalo: Yes, exactly. Having cognitive space, autonomous space and reflective space, is important. What they are giving the students is an opportunity to reflect and think about what they are learning and how they can use that without constraint.
They also work together. At work, people need to be able to work well with other people around them. That is why dialogic learning, learning through dialogue to communicate, find out, and respond back, is also important as a skill to develop in learners.
——You are showing many strategies for promoting deeper learning, dialogic learning, and critical thinking in the book.
Manalo: We tend to say, “It’s ours” or “It’s not ours,” instead of being eclectic and saying there are probably many different ways. Some teachers are really pro direct instruction while others are really pro inquiry learning, and they don’t realize that both of these are important. Actually, we should sometimes teach directly to students and sometimes also give them opportunities to explore and find out for themselves. Both have merits and both should be used, not one or the other. It’s important that teachers are equipped with a range of strategies and they know how to choose the right strategy depending on the child, the learning situation, and the difficulties that are being encountered.
■OA to diminish unequal accessibility to research materials among countries
——Sometimes I hear wonderful examples in the educational setting like you shared. If they are shared as research-based strategies in open access materials, many practitioners and hopefully policy makers will access them. Now I would like to ask you the reason why you decided to apply for our open access project.
Manalo: Because it is very important for the intended audience of this book to easily be able to access it, so that they can learn from it. There are some open access journals like Frontiers and PLOS One, but in general a lot of the important journals of Elsevier, Springer, Routledge, and other publishers are not freely available. So are books. A lot of researchers and educators in developing countries don’t have access to important books or journals, because their universities don’t have these books or subscribe to these journals. In some countries, the people are well to do. But there are also countries where people want to succeed and are making an effort but don’t have the resources. We are creating a situation where all of the knowledge is coming mainly from affluent developed countries and creating a gap between the countries that are developed and underdeveloped.
I’m an editor for a journal, Thinking Skills and Creativity, and I’m finding that in many papers coming from developing countries the references are outdated or from journals that are not that great or they are lacking on some key studies. If it’s just that the literature review is lacking, I suggest that they need to put more recent research and don’t reject it. But if the design is also bad because the information available to them is limited, we can’t really do very much. The quality of the study should not be compromised. It’s a problematic area. If there are opportunities for us to make what we are producing available more easily for people in every country to use, then that is beneficial.
■OA and increased access
——Do you know about the readership?
Manalo: Not directly, but I know some people. When I was still working in New Zealand I was involved in ATLAANZ, the Association of Tertiary Learning Advisors of Aotearoa New Zealand, and used to be president of it for several years. They are people who work at university and provide support or instruction for developing skills at university from undergraduate to doctoral level. I mentioned the availability of this book to them, and quite a few of them emailed me back saying, “This is a great resource,” “This is very useful,” and so on. A lot of them have downloaded it and they are probably using it for their work because their main work is to advise or teach students how to be more successful in their learning at university. When I told contributors of the book that this was going to be available and then it became available, almost all of them emailed me back saying, “This is wonderful and I can now share this more freely with the people that I know” and so forth. The downloads may also be related to the networks of some of the authors.
——Routledge provides the data of usage, or the number of downloads. The book was converted to open access at the beginning of 2021 and it has been downloaded more than 1000 times so far this year as of November, which is 10 times more than the last year. As you kindly shared with us, your publication is also available on Amazon.
Manalo: On Amazon, the Kindle version of this book is usually in the top 10 in the ranking of the categories such as “Educational Psychology,” “Educational Professional Development,” and “Education & Reference Pedagogy.” If you put something that is potentially useful in OA, people will read it.
■OA for getting research impact
——The book is practical and helpful, and the fact that it is freely available is also important.
Manalo: In this case, the purpose of the open access program that you have is a perfect match. I know that you want information to be more freely available, especially outputs that Kyoto University researchers are producing. That is exactly what we are achieving here.
——OA will help research outputs to be recognized worldwide.
Manalo: The OA project is achieving what we should be doing in universities. There is limited access to Japanese research overseas because a lot of researchers still don’t write in English. It is important for Japanese funding agencies to realize an opportunity like this is useful and it gets direct results. It also provides encouragement for other Japanese researchers to aspire to do something that can be shared with the rest of the world. Once it is put in open access, everyone can download it. MEXT and Japanese funding agencies need to signal more clearly to Japanese researchers the need to prioritize communication and sharing with the world.
——They began to mention open access to make it mandatory, to make things freely available, and I think that is at the moment as much as they can do and not in terms of language.
Manalo: That’s probably still a long way to go. But if they can see that the OA project is getting the impact it is intended for, hopefully they will fund it and more researchers can benefit from it. You can promote the impact that you are making with the project.
I also quite like the fact that you decided to make this open access even though many of the authors are not from Kyoto University. There are only two faculty members, Kusumi-sensei and I, from Kyoto University. I think that it is important not to be stuck with the rules that it should be all written by the Kyoto University staff or anything like that.
■Edited volumes and international collaborative research
——In the sciences, books are mainly for textbooks. But in the social sciences and humanities, an edited volume itself is a process for international collaborative research.
Manalo: Yes, exactly.
——What is often emphasized is the statistics of international collaboration journal articles, not this kind of edited volumes in spite of the fact that the impact and the citations are also linked to the network with many collaborating authors of edited volumes.
Manalo: If we are talking about bringing the work of Japanese researchers to the rest of the world, having authors from other countries will be a good strategy. The authors from Cambridge will bring readers to this book. While reading other chapters, those readers will say, “Oh, this is a chapter from Japan. What is it about?”
——In this OA project, there is one more volume that has also been downloaded quite a lot lately in many different countries and that is also an edited volume. I think there is value in edited volumes.
Manalo: Yes, most definitely. It’s the same with the special issues in journals. Having special issues is critical to pull expertise and combine the knowledge in the area that you are talking about. Recently we got people from around the world to contribute to a special issue about how to make use of failure for the journal that I’m editing.
——Do you have any plans to make it into a book?
Manalo: No, but I can check with the publisher, Elsevier. Apparently, it’s very successful for the journal and that is part of the reason why they appointed me as the editor of the journal after two years. It actually had an impact on their perception of me. I used to be on the editorial board and then they invited me to be the editor after the other co-editor decided to step down.
■International contributors and research network
——The publication has many, more than 40, contributors from many countries.
Manalo: One of the things that I was trying to do in this particular book was to get as many of the experts from around the world contributing to this. I don’t know any researchers in Africa as such, but there is a chapter from Israeli authors. If we include Israel as part of Africa, there is a contributor from every continent. I am quite happy with that, and they have been a wonderful bunch to work with. They are in their own ways, from recognized experts from Cambridge to researchers who may not be well known around the world but are doing research in this area, contributing to important knowledge development.
——Are they from your research network?
Manalo: Yes, a lot of them are from my research network. But for some topic areas, I approached researchers around the world to ask them, “I’m editing this book for Routledge, would you be interested in this?” Quite a few of them responded quite positively. Also by referral. Some people I already knew said, for example, “Would you like me to ask some colleagues, who are also doing research in this area and doing wonderful work, if they would like to contribute?” I said, “By all means, yes, please, and if they have some ideas of what they would like to do, contact me and I’ll check whether or not that would fit.” There were a few cases where I said, “Well, it’s not quite what I’m looking for,” but generally they fitted in.
——That must have been hard work.
Manalo: A considerable amount of hard work. I submitted it within the time frame that I agreed with Routledge, which I’m also happy about because another book was one-year delayed. I wanted to improve on that and deliver this book on time.
■Challenges of OA
——Do you think open access or open science can accelerate the speed of change?
Manalo: Yes, that can definitely help. The problem is that there are less qualified open access journals that are there to make money. They are not for promoting knowledge development but more for making some business for some people.
In terms of the main journals, it will usually cost you more than 300,000 JPY, or about 3000 USD, to publish your paper open access. So again, only rich universities and rich researchers can afford it, and people who are poor cannot publish open access papers in the good journals. Some journals have made adjustments so that they can publish open access papers from some countries, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
——Thank you very much. We still have a long way to go, but at least we shall keep trying.
Interview Date: 8 December 2021