Who Gets to Wield Academic Mjolnir?: On Worthiness, Knowledge Curation, and Using the Power of the People to Diversify OER

Abstract

In many academic fields Western/white/male/cishetero 2 /abled perspectives are often centered, while other perspectives are presented as "other." Implicitly, this sends messages to students that success looks like one type of person, knowledge is generated in one kind of way, and their background is not worth being centered. While open educational resources (OER) are often marketed as a tool for social justice, due to their ability to neutralize class-based differences (e.g., Okamoto 2013), there is no evidence that OER are any better than commercial texts at addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (see Mishra 2017 for a discussion of context). However, OER do present a good opportunity for diversification, due to the relatively simple nature of updating the content. This project takes a crowdsourcing approach to diversify OpenStax Psychology (OpenStax College 2014), an OER for Introductory Psychology courses. Contributors were asked to read areas of the textbook they were comfortable with and make suggestions to diversify the content. The author then used some of the suggestions to create modified chapters and conducted a study investigating the impact of the revisions. Participants read either the original chapter or the diversified chapter and completed a questionnaire assessing their sense of belongingness in the classroom/on campus. Overall, first-generation students had a reduced sense of belonging related to their financial circumstances. However, this effect was ameliorated for first-generation students who read the diversified chapter, compared to those who read the original chapter.

Open for antiracism: supporting educators to use open education for antiracist teaching

“…Black students borrow money more frequently than white students. Both Latinx and black students are more likely to pay for their own education than others who receive family support (Nusbaum, 2020). Thus, the cost of higher education reinforces socioeconomic inequities.…”

Doctoral Students’ Perspectives on Textbooks and Open Educational Resources: Needs, Impact, and Future Directions

“…Such limitations have necessitated that textbook purchasing efforts be coupled with other measures, e.g., OER. Some libraries have incentivized OER adoption for faculty and attempted to increase visibility of these programs (Todorinova & Wilkinson, 2019, 2020. The following sections describe literature on student and instructor perspectives on textbooks and OER and disciplinary differences.…”

“…In addition to the absence of graduate student perspectives, existing studies have generally targeted fields other than education. Among these discipline-specific investigations are ones in the fields of American history (Beile et al, 2020), engineering (Anderson et al, 2017;, film studies (Georgiadou & Kolaxizis, 2019), human factors (Choi & Carpenter, 2017), mathematics (Delgado et al, 2019;Hilton III et al, 2013;Muggli & Westermann, doi:10.13001/joerhe.v1i1.7205 CC-BY 4.0 2019), nutrition (Fialkowski et al, 2020;Lindshield & Adhikari, 2013;Tillinghast et al, 2020), physics (Hendricks et al, 2017), psychology (Cooney, 2017;Griggs & Jackson, 2017;Hardin et al, 2019;Jhangiani et al, 2019;Magro & Tabaei, 2019;Nusbaum, 2020;Nusbaum et al, 2020;Vojtech & Grissett, 2017), and sociology (Ross et al, 2018). The lack of research on the role of OER specifically within the education field, particularly at the graduate level, is striking, given that these students are somewhat uniquely situated to understand the educational context.…”

“…Textbook costs have risen 36% in the past decade (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, 2021). At the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), the average textbook cost for all students was $1,840 in the fiscal year 2020(National Center for Education Statistics, 2022. Given this challenge, the Penn State Libraries have been supporting students' textbook needs in different ways, including open educational resources (OER), open access (OA) resources, and licensed or purchased content.…”

Open Educational Resource-Enabled Pedagogy to Improve Student Outcomes in Nutrition Course

“…10 Open Educational Resource-enabled pedagogy (OEP), a process that invites students to be a part of the teaching process and participate in the co-creation of knowledge, 11 is one strategy to improve student participation. Empirically-supported OEP approaches range from annotating existing materials to reflect the student perspective 12 to developing new core and ancillary 13 course materials that can be used by future students. 14,15 At the heart of OEP are Open Educational Resources (OER): materials available under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others.…”