I have learned that to be an antiracist instructor… I have to be willing to start and intentionally engage in conversations surrounding privilege, oppression, healing, and agency.
–OFAR Participant
Updates to OFAR course between 2022-2023
In Year 3, we streamlined the activities and supports for the Antiracist Pedagogy Action Plan. Coaches, essential in facilitating clear communication, significantly aided in ensuring OFAR participants’ smooth journey to OFAR program completion, including action plan execution.
Kim Grewe, Course Developer and Facilitator
We created an openly licensed curriculum, allowing participants to explore anti-racist Open Pedagogy in their own contexts. The curriculum aims to answer four key questions:
- What is Antiracism?
- What are Open Educational Resources and how can they support antiracism?
- What is Open Pedagogy and how can it support antiracism?
- How can you create an antiracism action plan?
These questions form the basis of the four modules in the openly licensed curriculum, which is available in Canvas Commons in both a self-paced and facilitated format. Each version includes an introductory module to help orient learners, find and create communities of practice, and navigate Canvas, the platform in which the courses have been released.
Self-paced Curriculum
For independent learners, the self-paced curriculum features self-check quizzes and personal reflections to help the learner assess their understanding and identify topics which may warrant a more in-depth review.
Facilitated Curriculum
For classroom and group settings, the facilitated curriculum features small group discussion activities to help learners come together to discuss and deepen their understanding of OER and anti-racist practices and self-reflections.
Modules and learning outcomes
Module 0: Orientation
Completing this module will allow learners to:
- Become familiar with course layout and expectations
- Meet your facilitators, coaches, and OFAR colleagues
- Collaborate with your team to identify what support from a coach would benefit you (individually and as a team)
- Review the Antiracism Action Plan template and begin thinking about what changes participants wants to implement more immediately and long-term in their courses
Module 1: Community Building
Completing this module will allow learners to:
- Begin to build a Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) through positive engagement with classmates
- Develop a framework for open, frank, and positive engagement in our course
- Reflect on how to build community in the classroom and sustain professional growth through community for oneself
Module 2: What is Antiracism?
Completing this module will allow learners to:
- Develop a comprehensive and current definition of antiracism, contrasting it to other related terms such as equity, inclusion, and diversity
- Explore various emotional responses to antiracism discussions, including your own
- Define antiracist pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy, and culturally relevant pedagogy, and identify how to apply these framework to your teaching and learning
Module 3: What are Open Educational Resources (OER) and How Can They Support Antiracism?
Completing this module will allow learners to:
- Define OER
- Explore various types of OER and repositories where they can be found
- Explore Creative Commons and open licensing
- Practice adding an open license to your work
- Explore the ways in which OER use intersects with Antiracist pedagogy
Module 4: What is Open Pedagogy and How Can it Support Antiracism?
Completing this module will allow learners to:
- Define open pedagogy
- Examine the ways in which open pedagogical practices intersect with antiracism
- Incorporate elements of Open Pedagogy into your Antiracism Action Plan
Module 5: The Time is Now — Finalizing your Antiracism Action Plan
Completing this module will allow learners to:
- Acknowledge, reflect, and commit to action
The culminating project for this OFAR course, and the final module, focuses on creating an Antiracism Action Plan. This plan will integrate Open Educational Resources (OER) and/or open pedagogical approaches to create more antiracist curriculum, course content, and learning experiences for your students. The module includes a template to help learners structure their action plan and assignments to encourage engaging with others’ plans in order to develop specific, timed, achievable and relevant goals for an upcoming term or semester. Learners will acknowledge, reflect, and commit to action as a result of their action plan development.
Ultimately, the aim of the antiracism action plans is to help participants:
- Discuss how you intend to integrate OER and open pedagogy as a way to make your teaching and learning explicitly antiracist.
- Think both in terms of short-term, easily implemented actions or projects and then then think about the long term.
- How can you extend or “scale up” your idea? Bring others in? Expand your reach?
As an antiracist educator, I will continuously elevate and validate my students. I will identify barriers that my students are confronted with and find ways to dismantle them.
–OFAR Participant
Hear from the course developers
Kim Grewe, Northern Virginia Community College
“Like many social justice-minded educators, as the COVID-19 pandemic wore on and the racial disparities that are part and parcel of our racist society were magnified, I felt keenly that I needed to DO something to champion antiracist policies and ideas. As an advocate of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogical practices (OPP), I could see the ways in which the tenets of open pedagogy and antiracism seemed to go hand in hand. But how to make an impact right now?” Read more …
Joy Shoemate, Director of Online Learning, College of the Canyons
“We had a goal of immediately trying to build a sense of community with participants because there is a great deal of vulnerability required to lean into the discomfort surrounding difficult discussions around race and racism. As facilitators, we were excited to learn from participants and knew each of them were bringing in a wealth of knowledge. We were intentional about exploring concepts from a theoretical and practical standpoint, and scaffolding content so as to support faculty participants with the development of their action plans.” Read more …
