Exploring the Tools of Open Education to Make Classrooms Antiracist and Inclusive

This learning lab is an opportunity for participants to explore open education and its affordances to transform higher education teaching and learning to be more inclusive and antiracist. Various social justice, antiracist, and culturally relevant pedagogy frameworks will be examined, discussed, and then applied as a lens for examining the history of different teaching disciplines. Finally, participants will be encouraged to brainstorm how they can adopt and develop open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) to create antiracist and inclusive learning environments at their institutions.

Although it is generally accepted that adoption of open educational resources to replace commercial textbooks reduces cost barriers and increases equitable access for low-income and otherwise marginalized students, the question of how these resources engage marginalized students and address their particular needs remains an open question. Multiple studies comparing open textbooks to commercial textbooks have found a similar lack of diverse voices and cultures represented in both.

There are multiple frameworks that can be used to examine existing open educational resources and practices and to support the transition to inclusive and antiracist classroom content and practices:
I. Sarah Lambert (2018) builds on a social justice framework to support the transition of open educational resources to be diverse, equitable, and include. She identifies and expands on three principles of social justice that may be applied to OER: redistributive justice, recognitive justice, and representational justices.

II. According to Kyoko Kishimoto (2016), anti-racist pedagogy includes three components:
“(1) incorporating the topics of race and inequality into course content, (2) teaching from an anti-racist pedagogical approach, and (3) anti-racist organizing within the campus and linking our efforts to the surrounding community.”

III. Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) proposed three main components of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: (a) a focus on student learning and academic success, (b) developing students’ cultural competence to assist students in developing positive ethnic and social identities, and (c) supporting students’ critical consciousness or their ability to recognize and critique societal inequalities.

The learning lab will be divided into three main sections:
Facilitators and participants will share and discuss definitions of open educational practices and how they intersect with social justice frameworks such as:
+Sarah Lambert’s social justice framework for open education
+Kyoko Kishimoto’s Antiracist Pedagogy
+Gloria Ladson-Billings Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Participants will be invited to examine the historical biases of their chosen disciplines using one or more of the previously discussed frameworks. Facilitator(s) will share analysis of a discipline from their professional experience to start the activity.

Finally, participants will generate examples of how they might transform open educational resources and practices working with students to create a more inclusive and antiracist environment to engage marginalized students. Facilitators may join in with examples from their own antiracist and inclusive teaching practices.

Kyoko Kishimoto (2018) Anti-racist pedagogy: from faculty’s self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom, Race Ethnicity and Education, 21:4, 540-554, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248824

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.2307/1163320

Lambert, Sara Roslyn (2018) Changing Our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education, Journal of Learning for Development, 5:3,225-244, Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education | Journal of Learning for Development.

Info

:eye_in_speech_bubble: Presented by:: Una Daly, Liz Yata
:sun: Conference Track: Learning Lab
:spiral_calendar: Track Date/Time: 2022-05-24T14:45:00Z (your local time)
:speech_balloon: Language: English
:calling: Pretalx link: Exploring the Tools of Open Education to Make Classrooms Antiracist and Inclusive :: Open Education Global 2022 :: pretalx

Participate

Authors are asked to reply below with links to presentation materials, videos, and other relevant resources, as well as posting prompts for discussion.

Conference participants can reply below with questions, comments for the presenters or to share related resources. And please add anything relevant from this session as an annotation to a specific part of the UNESCO OER Recommendation.

Slides: OEG22 Learning Lab - Google Slides