"The Pictures Allowed Me to Connect to the Material More": Student Perceptions of a Diversity-Focused Open Pedagogy Assignment

Abstract

A racially-diverse sample of Introductory Psychology students (n = 32) completed a semester-long open pedagogy assignment focused on improving diversity depicted in photographs in psychology textbooks. Students first did a content analysis on racial and gender diversity within a popular openly-licensed Introductory Psychology textbook (i.e., an open educational resource) and found that White presenting men were overrepresented. Then, for each broad topic in the course, students shared a topic-relevant photograph they had taken with the purpose of improving the diversity of textbook content. Students assigned these photographs Creative Commons (CC) license. Because the openly-licensed textbook also had a Creative Commons license, the photographs could be used to edit the textbook. The final project included posting two photographs on a public Flickr account with a CC license. Seventy-five percent of students indicated a medium- to high-level of understanding of the goal of the project being to increase diversity in the photographs available for OER textbooks. Overall, students rated the project as an engaging and positive experience with high levels of educational value. Moreover, students generally agreed that their contributions added to the diversity of publicly-available materials. The most common concern about the project was that photographs would be openly available to the world at large. Students who indicated higher levels of concern with openness were also less likely to want to do a similar project in another course.