10 New Human Services Open Textbooks – Elizabeth B. Pearce and Students
When the pandemic struck, Elizabeth (Liz) B. Pearce and her students were in the midst of an ambitious project to create an open textbook for HDFS 201: Contemporary Families in the United States. They finished the book, Contemporary Families: An Equity Lens, in summer 2020, and didn’t stop there! Liz began writing another book for HDFS 262, Introduction to Human Services. Liz won the LBCC’s Pastega Faculty Award for her innovative teaching career, the original student contributors of Contemporary Families won LBCC’s Unity Award, and students continued to write new chapters for Contemporary Families.
As our world came screeching to a halt in March 2020, I went into survival mode with my students, family, and colleagues. Shifting classes, projects, and family celebrations to the online environment collided with the media’s focus on the killing of George Floyd and elevation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I needed to survive and support my students and children, also students, in their work to survive, succeed, and perhaps thrive.
I needed to thrive. I needed a mission that took me outside of my own concerns and to work for something greater than my own world.
I had been co-creating Contemporary Families: An Equity Lens with 13 students in an open pedagogy project for six months. The project was in rough draft form. I decided to volunteer my summer months to completing the text and getting it into publishable form. Liz Baker, Michaela Willi Hooper, and Lauren Antrosiglio all volunteered their pandemic time with me. For 3 hours every day I worked on writing, editing, and moving the text into Pressbook form which we accomplished just in time for 100 students to read it in the Fall of 2021.
Knowing that I was working for students past and present gave my life meaning during the pandemic.
Then the fires hit and my first backpacking trip for which I had planned all summer was canceled. A loss on top of a loss. I have to admit I did not dig into this second project as graciously, but I used the time to pull together chapters from multiple openly licensed texts and to write a few original chapters for this (still unfinished) textbook for human services majors. The section on Social Justice in this chapter speaks to me and to the work that all of us are doing to integrate the loss of life experienced by our communities of color and other marginalized groups.
As we move into the next chapter of the pandemic, I want to hold onto the strength and purpose that fueled me to create texts that make education more equitable. That equity comes not just through cost, but also through co-creation and content that attempts to progress movements such as Black Lives Matter forward.
Liz Pearce
June 2021
Attribution: Image by Katie Niemeyer in Contemporary Families: An Equity Lens. License: CC BY 4.0.