This panel presentation will strategize methods for reimagining OER and open education/open enabled pedagogy, taking for its example an English literature anthology published by the University of North Georgia Press in partnership with Affordable Learning Georgia. Encouraging the interrogation of explicit and implicit racist, gender-biased, and classist assumptions in OER is necessary to support OER’s goals for equitable and accessible learning environments.
That racist, gender-biased, and classist assumptions can be found in already published OER is exemplified in the medieval section of UNG Press’s English literature anthology. That these assumptions can pass such peer reviewed texts as this should alert instructors to the need for interrogating OER, especially on its possibly outdated scholarship.
As OER is and should be always available to reuse, revision, and remixing, such gaps and assumptions in published OER need not be overlooked or passed by. Rather, they may provide objective sites for interrogation, critique, and recuperation. This process can be facilitated by revision and annotation as well as by strategic open enabled pedagogy assignments.
Lainie Pomerleau will exemplify such revision through her new introductions to the medieval era section of UNG Press’s English literary anthology. These introductions address the racist implications of identifying literature as Anglo Saxon, an anachronistic term that would be unrecognizable during the period it purports to represent and that has been used by white supremacists and hate groups. These revisions model how OER may work to avoid reinscribing canonical and systemic gaps while also offering sites for interrogating such gaps.
Bonnie J. Robinson will consider how interrogating OER, particularly through open enabled pedagogy assignments that encourage inclusivity, can engage collective efforts to address structural issues of racism, sexism, inclusiveness, and representation. Asking students to critique constituent elements of OER, for example, can provide insight on how scholarship shapes pedagogical tools like textbooks and can allow objective critique of OERs’ purpose and effect and the discrepancies that may exist between them.
And Corey Parson will consider how OERs' online presence provides unique opportunities for audience awareness. This awareness stresses the importance of not equating open with neutral (Approaching Open Pedagogy in Community and Collaboration).
Learning Outcomes: From this presentation, attendees will learn how and why to interrogate assumptions of OER as neutral; model such interrogations on recent revisions to an open access peer reviewed British literature anthology; frame such interrogations structurally and objectively to encourage respecting issues of gender, race, and class; match such interrogations with constituent element assessment rubrics and categories; and apply strategies of audience awareness unique to OER.
