Marcela Morales (@marcela) reflects on the obstacle of “legitimacy”, when educators do not feel legitimate enough to share. @marcela explains how this well-known feeling can lead to self-censorhip, and how having a few sharing may weakened open education. To overcome this feeling, and dismantle it “collectively and intentionally”, she provides us with 5 key points to “refram[e] legitimacy: from prestige to pratice”.
“Beyond Prestige: Whose Knowledge Counts in Open Education?” by Marcela Morales
Am I legitimate in sharing? This question, which we all ask ourselves, is the starting point for the article by Marcela Morales (Mexico), co-executive director of Open Education Global. Her analysis and answer should reassure us…
More applause for @marcela - she is around this space so I hope we can spur her into some conversation.
As Erwant has noted in thr summaries, the challenges are quite overlapping- Marcela’s list of doubts
My materials are too basic to be worth sharing.
My teaching context will be dismissed as less rigorous or less relevant.
What I do is too local and specific to matter beyond my setting.
I don’t have the right language, framing, or institutional standing to contribute.
are directly part of today’s article on Judgement – so then is legitmacy rest upon a freedom of [self] judgement? or is some kind of function of it?
And since sharing os an action of belonging:
At its core, open education is not only about access to resources; it is about belonging to a shared knowledge commons. Sharing becomes an act of presence and recognition, a way of saying: my experience matters, my context matters, and I belong to this collective effort.
How about a collective effort here to talk about legitimacy (and all the other topics). How it the lack of it better addressed in this community, this is a shared knowledge commons, right? And @marcela having your post published on the second day, what feedback have you gotten? Has your thoughts evolved any new ideas since this has been out on the world?
When I was invited to contribute to the Sharing is a Challenge series, I found myself returning to a question I’ve heard across many conversations with educators:
“Is my work valuable enough to share with the world?”
This question doesn’t usually surface in formal discussions about open education. We tend to focus on practices, infrastructure, licensing, or policy. And yet, again and again, what I hear underneath is something more personal: a hesitation shaped by perceptions of prestige, institutional recognition, and whose knowledge is seen to “count.”
This piece was an attempt to name that tension more explicitly, not as an individual barrier, but as something collectively produced, and therefore something we can collectively shift.
Since the article has been out in the world, I’ve been struck by how widely this resonates. The doubts are familiar across contexts, but so is the desire to contribute, to connect, and to be part of a shared knowledge commons. It has also reinforced for me that legitimacy is not something we need to “earn” before sharing; it often emerges through the act of sharing itself.
One question I would like to open here for conversation:
How can we, as a community, more intentionally create conditions where people feel their knowledge and experiences are both valid and valued enough to share?