Author Message to Future Instructors

Instructors, I am pleased and honored that you are considering using this resource in your own teaching. Creating this text was a labor of love for me, offered in the hope that it would reach as many students as possible. I have tried to leverage my many years of experience as a lawyer and as an advocate for people with disabilities to provide accurate information in a clear format, accessible – and hopefully interesting – to a wide array of students. I use this text to teach students in our college’s criminal justice program, and I am pleased each term that the course draws students from programs throughout the college, from paralegal to emergency medical technician to psychology.

For students in any of these areas of study, the text offers information about a historically marginalized group of people in our society, those who live with mental illness and disability, both generally and particularly as they interact with the criminal justice system. This book connects to standard criminal justice topics of criminal law, criminal courts, and law enforcement, but goes far beyond the standard curriculum in those courses to explore the history, needs, and problems associated with our focus population.

The text should enable instructors with expertise in criminal justice, law, or behavioral health to guide students through the material. Throughout the text, I have linked resources (such as the federal government agency and authority SAMHSA, and the mental health advocacy organization NAMI) that can provide instructors and students alike with additional and supporting information. Likewise, numerous videos are linked to provide additional perspectives, such as from people with lived experience of incarceration, mental illness, disability, substance use disorders, and recovery, as well as experience in the various career opportunities available and introduced in the final chapter.

The text is divided into ten chapters to align with the typical 10-week term at Oregon public colleges and universities. There is certainly room to expand any chapter (I would suggest Chapter 4, focused on criminalization of mental disorders, or Chapter 5, focused on crisis response and law enforcement) to fill a 12-week term. Throughout the text there are boxed sections highlighting areas of interest that could be extended, depending on student interest.

About Course Packs

This book includes openly licensed course materials, also known as open course packs, for future educators to review, use, and adapt to their own teaching. An open course pack is an aligned and accessible set of openly licensed course materials that fully integrate with the open textbook. Anyone can retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute them. Best of all, future instructors can build on existing learning pathways that are fully aligned with textbook learning outcomes and content.

Oregon instructors designed each course pack in consultation with an instructional designer and, in most cases, revised each course pack based on feedback from Oregon students and an advisory board of workforce members. In each course pack, you will find a complete course map, an instructor guide, and ancillary materials including assignment prompts, rubrics, and suggested activities.

Open course packs from Open Oregon Educational Resources are designed with an equity lens. This means that they center the voices and experiences of underserved student populations. They are designed with equity-minded pedagogies, including Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT), and Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), and Open Educational Practices (OEP).

[Link to course pack site]

Licenses and attributions for Instructor Resources

Author Message to Instructors by Anne Nichol under CC BY-NC 4.0.

About Course Packs by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.