Participation and Social Justice with OER

In the previous chapter, Inclusive and Accessible OERs, we discussed how instructors could create more diverse and inclusive OERs. In the end, however, we uncovered how diversity and inclusion in textbooks are not enough to deal with systemic classroom issues. This chapter will present how educators can help build a more socially just education with OERs.

Social Justice

Social justice encompasses addressing oppression and marginalization in multiple ways, including recognition, the topic the previous chapter focused on. Now we will explore who gets to be represented as a knowledge creator and whose knowledge is lifted up as worthy of teaching and learning. In other words, while questions about recognition ask “Who is in the room?”, addressing oppression and marginalization attempts to answer “Who is trying to get in the room but cannot?” and “Whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure and minimization?”¹

In Changing Our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education, Sarah Lamberts calls this line of social justice “representational justice.” Instead of just telling the stories of marginalized people or communities, she advocates for open materials that would encourage students from marginalized backgrounds to speak for themselves (a detailed table on redistributive, recognitive and representational justices can be found in our chapter Evaluating OER).

The first step to address representational justice in the classroom is to identify that there is no superior or single source of knowledge. In this context, instructors can revise and create open resources to give voice to their students, especially students of color, queer, trans, and non-binary students, and students with disabilities.

OERs are ideal for pursuing this goal since these resources can be adjusted, updated, translated, and reviewed while a course is being taught. In other words, OERs allow students to simultaneously use and create their classroom materials.

Participatory teaching and learning with OER

Participation goes beyond the bare-minimum inclusion of diverse points of view in textbooks. Instead of inviting students to engage with OERs that have already been configured, participation means inviting them to develop and define the purpose of the resources. Along with access, equity, diversity, and human rights, participation is one of the principles of social justice.

In the 2022 Open Education Network Summit presentation “Creating a Socially Just Open Education,” Jasmine Roberts-Crews describes her experiences enabling active "co-creation" with students in class and provides tools for instructors to follow her lead. She advises educators to co-create class assignments or attendance policies with their students and argues that the key point to enabling student participation lies in encouraging them to interrogate the purpose of the classroom, the content, and the teaching.

Receiving opinions about their own teaching can be hard for educators. Yet, for Roberts-Crews, this is essential to disrupt some of the traditional power dynamics that dictate what knowledge is and who owns it. Also, this openness “affirms that the students' feedback and the way in which they're participating in the classroom is valuable.”

Creating a Socially Just Open Education from Open Education Network, licensed under CC BY 4.0

OERs, as the Open Pedagogy Notebook demonstrates, can be designed so that students can shape and build the knowledge they contain as the course progresses. Open educational practices, such as the co-creation of openly-published texts, open peer review, and open annotation, can provide a way to begin to see knowledge as something students are creating, not as something that belongs to the educators and is distant from them. From the start, students can understand knowledge and knowledge production as something that is not unfamiliar and, therefore, not fixed.

Here is a list of examples and tools that instructors can use in their classrooms:

- NYU offers a platform to start working openly with students. Manifold, the platform on which this Toolkit is hosted, is an online site where instructors can publish and share open resources and where the students can comment publicly, within a class reading group, or privately. Annotating a chapter or a textbook section as a class exercise can help students include their experiences and feel actively engaged in producing knowledge. If you are part of the NYU community, you can log in and annotate and highlight parts of this chapter, which is published in Manifold. What you add will be available to future readers and us.

- Wikipedia also allows student participation. WikiEdu shared the story of Dr. Amin Azzam, a professor of psychiatry at the UC-San Francisco School of Medicine, who sought with his class to improve medical articles on Wikipedia in 2016. In collaboration with fourth-year medical students, Dr. Azzam's class reviewed and edited the top 100 most consulted medical articles on Wikipedia. Through a partnership with Translators Without Borders, these were translated into 100 languages.

- The authors of the Open Pedagogy Notebook give other tips for encouraging student participation in creating classroom content. Bringing students together with non-profit organizations to design open materials that serve both the classroom and a specific community can add value to academic work. They also recommend connecting students with authors, practitioners, and experts in their disciplines. Interviews or discussions can be the basis for new content that can be developed in class and published openly for future students.

The information in this chapter was adapted from

-How can teaching materials promote equity? by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ,

-Open Pedagogy for the Open Pedagogy Notebook,

-Creating a Socially Just Open Education by Jasmine Roberts-Crews for the Open Education Network Summit 2022,

-For Wikipedia, the Doctor is in … class by Eryk Salvaggio for WikiEdu, and

-Changing Our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education Sarah Roslyn Lambert for Journal of Learning for Development 5 (3),

all of them licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Go to: What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)?; OER and its Benefits; Finding OER; Evaluating OER; Revising and Remixing OER; Creating and Publishing OER; Reusing and Redistributing OER to Students; The Myths of OER; Critical Perspectives for Engaging with OER; Sustainable Financial Models for Funding OERs, or Inclusive and Accessible OER

^{1. [Attributed to D.L. Stewart in Roberts-Crews, Jasmine, “Creating a Socially Just Open Education,” YouTube, uploaded by Open Education Network, 15 Aug. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8ZeN6VnN7U&list=PLWRE6ioG4vda3mySvrrlO7Z5hQ9Jhv22l&. ]↩}