Y1 Unit 2.3: Equity and Open Educational Resources
Open licenses are a huge innovation for course materials simply because affordable course materials make a real financial difference to students. But the transformative potential of open education must not stop there, otherwise we risk reproducing the inequity and harm that already exist in our curricula (Klaudinyi, 2022).
An open license tells you about the permissions that you have to use or reuse content. It doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the work, and it doesn’t mean that the work is designed to support diverse students in your classroom. That’s why the Open Curriculum Development Project explicitly brings an equity lens to our curriculum design process.
Open Curriculum Project Equity Statement
Please reread the Open Curriculum Project Equity Statement below. It is licensed CC-BY, so you can use it, with attribution, as a starting point for your project’s equity statement if you want to.
The Open Oregon Educational Resources Open Curriculum Development Project creates course materials that challenge structures of power and oppression. We provide tools and resources to make diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) primary considerations when faculty choose, adapt, and develop course materials. In promoting DEI, our project is committed to:
- Ensuring diversity of representation within our team and the materials we distribute
- Publishing materials that use accessible, clear language for our target audience
- Sharing course materials that directly address and interrogate systems of oppression, equipping students and educators with the knowledge to do the same
Designing and piloting openly licensed, intersectional, and antiracist course materials is one starting point among many when addressing inequities in higher education. Our project invites students and educators to engage with us in this work, and we value spaces where learning communities can grow and engage together.
We welcome being held accountable to this statement and will respond to feedback submitted via our contact page [Website].
Draft an Equity Statement for Your Curriculum
Your team will do your first shared writing project this week: drafting an equity statement that is specific to your curriculum. We recommend reflecting on the project-level equity statement, above, because it is openly licensed so you have permission to adopt or adapt it, with attribution (which we explain how to do in the next section). Your interpretation of the project equity statement can help clarify your team’s goals for your curriculum. When you think about drafting the equity statement for your curriculum, consider how you will respond to the gaps that you notice in the materials from your background scan.
The questions below are prompts to help you think about how you will apply an equity lens to your curriculum design. Please make a copy of the document Equity Statement Reflection [Google Doc] to get started.
- Review student demographics reports from your institution’s research unit. What social identities are represented in student enrollment at your institution? Which students are in the majority? Which students are in the minority? How might your project include the self-described experiences and voices from communities that have been historically excluded from higher education?
- Consider how and when Oregon communities have contributed to your subject or discipline and how your subject or discipline has contributed to Oregon communities. What relationships are important to emphasize that students may not know about?
- Consider inviting student contributions to your book (this is discussed in more detail in the Open Pedagogy feature in Unit 3 and is an optional component of your project). Whether or not you will include student work, can you think of three different ways you could bring student voices into your work?
Equity statements are most effective when they situate the purpose and values of a project within ongoing movements for justice. Equity statements also are strongest when they name specific commitments a team will make to uphold the group’s purpose and values. Equity can be considered both an outcome (as in the case of equity-minded curriculum) as well as a process (as in the case of equity-minded authorship; V. Scott, personal communication, February 16, 2022).
To draft your equity statement as a group, follow the prompts in your {Course #} About This Book document. You’ll use meeting time to collaboratively write a rough draft in your {Course #} About This Book document. At our next project meeting, we’ll workshop drafts and get help from our Equity Consultant to align them with the project’s criteria for success: learner focus, representation of diverse voices, accessibility, and Oregon context.
Final versions of project-level equity statements do not need to follow the three-part format that the template suggests. Often equity statements end up taking shape in a single paragraph that blends together several writing voices. However, using this structure as a starting point can help your group to get specific and have something to revise together.
Licenses and Attributions for Equity and Open Educational Resources
Open content, original
“Equity and Open Educational Resources” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
References
Klaudinyi, J. (2022). What’s the problem? Equity and Open Education Faculty Cohort – main. https://canvas.instructure.com/accounts/10/external_tools/69910?launch_type=global_navigation
