by Quill West, Open Ed Project Manager, Pierce College District, and CCCOER President
This is Scary
I volunteered to be the person to write the overview blog post because I want to engage this community on this topic. However, this is probably the piece of writing that has terrified me the most in the past five years because I am no expert in EDI work. As a novice, I worry that there are things that I’ll get wrong – and the stakes seem particularly high in exposing myself as a professional who doesn’t “get it.” In a day and age when I’m constantly asked to #staywoke, I’m afraid to admit that I don’t always know what it means to be awake – especially in relation to my teaching and learning. I’m told by colleagues that a big part of EDI work, and modeling that work to my students, is admitting my insecurity. So, here we go. I’m vulnerable because I don’t have all the answers. If you have some answers, please volunteer to be one of our guest bloggers on EDI. I would love to have your voice.
Access is not Equity
A lot of our collective arguments for embracing OE at our institutions have revolved around the issue of cost and increasing access to education. It’s a good argument. When traditionally produced educational materials carry a prohibitive cost, the argument for no or low-cost options is obvious. As important as access is to students and to institutions, it is a starting place for leveraging other benefits of OER, and I hope that our conversations about OE go beyond access, because saving money on materials doesn’t address bigger issues in student persistence and completion. That is why I have been so excited to hear a growing interest in equity, diversity, and inclusion in the wider open education movement. I think we need to embrace the questions about how to be more inclusive educators who value diversity and recognize that access and equity are not the same thing.
One of the biggest questions that I have is, “What does equity look like in relation to OER? What can I do to help OER equal equity?”
Diversity and Inclusion
As we heard from Francesca Carpenter, Preston Davis, and Daphnie Sicre in their recent CCCOER webinar, OERs are not inherently diverse, nor are they necessarily inclusive. It is definitely possible for OER to include more diverse voices, but I suspect that intentional design is more important in creating inclusive learning than the licensing on the materials. For weeks I had this really messy drawing on my office whiteboard. It showed the process of authoring educational resources. I was trying to compare a traditional publishing model to an OER model so that I had a sense of how to address inclusivity and diversity in the design of courses at my institution. One of my realizations was that still, even with OER, authorship looks like a single or cohesive collection of people authoring materials meant to be used by everyone else. There is a very clear line between who writes educational material (mostly academics educated in a Western tradition) and who consumes educational resources (mostly students who are growing into a Western tradition of education).
Diversity, in the OER sense, can be introduced when we curate, remix, and revise resources into our courses. We can also leverage OER-enabled pedagogy to solicit students in creating diversity for class materials. The goal being to ensure their voices and perspectives are authentic and accurately represented. I’m curious to hear how people approach diversity, both of content but also of thought in their teaching practices. I want to hear what all of you are doing, and I want to know how it is going.
Going Forward
Consider this our call for you to be our guest bloggers. CCCOER wants to hear from our members and readers about how you’re considering equity, diversity, and inclusion in your teaching and learning practice. How do OER and EDI overlap? How do you work to foster both in your work? What can you share about overcoming personal or pedagogical challenges and remixing and creating OER with an EDI perspective? We’re going to keep considering these issues in the CCCOER blog, in our email lists, and via our webinars as the year progresses, and we’d love to hear from you.
Please consider contributing to this blog regarding your EDI work. (Even if you’ve written about OER and EDI in another space, we can link to other writings.) Please share your perspective by contacting us at info@cccoer.org. We can’t wait to hear how you are focusing on EDI in your professional practice.
Featured image image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay