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Open at the Margins: OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining

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OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table Of Contents
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Introduction
  7. Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must be Confronted Head On
  8. From "Open" to Justice
  9. The Fallacy of “Open”
  10. A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content
  11. Decolonising the Collection, Analyses and Use of Student Data: A Tentative Exploration/Proposal
  12. Reflections on Generosity of Spirit: Barriers to Working in the Open
  13. Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley
  14. Open Education in Palestine: A Tool for Liberation
  15. Open Hearts, Open Minds, Crossed Purposes
  16. Antigonish 2.0: A Way for Higher Ed to Help Save the Web
  17. What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice
  18. Locks on our Bridges: Critical and Generative Lenses on Open Education
  19. Reclaiming Disruption
  20. Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms
  21. Queering Open Pedagogy
  22. Student Spotlight: Matthew Moore, The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, 2nd edition
  23. Open Education, Open Questions
  24. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Open Research and Education
  25. OER and the Language Problem (Part 2): The Status and Function Rationale
  26. Towards Openness Provocation for #oeb17: How to Create a Non-inclusive Learning Environment
  27. Queer Histories, Videotape, and the Ethics of Reuse
  28. Breaking Open: Ethics, Epistemology, Equity, and Power
  29. OER, CARE, Stewardship, and the Commons
  30. OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining
  31. Open as in Dangerous
  32. When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South
  33. What Open Education Taught Me
  34. The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation
  35. Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination
  36. The Future of the Public Mission of Universities
  37. The Tyranny of “Clear” Thinking
  38. Open Praxis: Three Perspectives, One Vision
  39. Holding the Line on Open in an Evolving Courseware Landscape
  40. Exploring Origins as a Decolonizing Practice
  41. Openness in Whose Interest?
  42. Logic and Rhetoric: The Problem with Digital Literacy
  43. Educational Content, Openness and Surveillance in the Digital Ecology
  44. A Reflection on Open: An Open Reflection
  45. Accessibility Assessment

24

OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining

Rajiv Jhangiani

Originally published on April 6, 2018

The open education movement wants to be a force for equity. The argument is straightforward and powerful: Widen access to educational resources and those who disproportionately suffer at the hands of the exploitative business models of commercial publishers will disproportionately benefit, in both economic and educational terms. As someone who has personally benefited from generous and life-changing sponsorship of access to a high quality education, this argument is not simply theoretical for me. It is my lived experience. This is why I will never stop pushing for nor understate the importance of widening access to education. But if the open education movement holds the goal of equity as dearly as I believe we do, we need to ensure that we do not restrict our definition of equity to only those who will reuse the resources. For if we ignore the question of equity as it applied to educators who create, revise, and remix OER, we risk perpetrating harm with the best of intentions.

In my capacity as an administrator supporting open education at a public post-secondary institution with an open access mandate, I am vehement about the need to adequately support those of my colleagues who wish to engage in open educational practices. And by support, I mean through sufficient time, adequate funding, required training, and earned recognition. While this position may be construed as pragmatic or instrumental, for me it strikes at the heart of addressing equity. For if the movement relies on voluntary academic labour or severely under-compensated academic labour to create, peer-review, and contextualize OER, we are in effect perpetrating an implicit form of redlining1, one that reserves the capacity to create or adapt OER for those who already enjoy positions of privilege, such as the tenured or those who do not need the income. In such an eventuality, despite the best of intentions, the ideologies (including biases and prejudices) associated with those positions of privilege become reflected and over-represented in the available OER. And while I often describe how powerful it can be to exercise the permission to revise OER by simply changing the names that appear within a text’s examples so that they reflect the diversity of the classroom, that we have to do this at all is a subtle symptom of the types of exclusivity that can exist in OER—and something we need to work against.

Make no mistake—in highlighting this problem, I am not pitting the democratization of knowledge creation against equitable access to education. Rather, I am highlighting that access to knowledge creation ought to be equitable as well. As has been noted before, diversity is a fact but inclusion is a choice. So this is a call for open education projects, funders, and universities to become aware of the inadvertent implications of inadequately supporting OER creators and adaptors as well as to be attentive to who are given the opportunity and support to create and adapt OER. Supporting and nurturing stewards at a grassroots level and supporting the building of community across such stewards helps make open education both more sustainable and more equitable.

One of the things I love about the open education movement is that its values are those that educators largely already hold. This is why you find that even the decision of an academic department to standardize an assigned commercial textbook is usually driven by a desire to negotiate a lower cost for students and/or to avoid having students who need to re-take a course having to buy a second book. This also means that the seeds for a grassroots community have already been planted. And while the image of grass growing out through cracks in concrete may be used to signify resilience and drive, I would much rather ensure that we deliberately cultivate more fertile ground.

Notes

1. For related concepts see Chris Gilliard’s writing on digital redlining and Safiya Noble’s writing on technological redlining.

About the Author

Rajiv S. Jhangiani is the Acting Vice Provost, Teaching & Learning & Associate Vice Provost, Open Education at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada. The architect of Canada’s first Zero Textbook Cost degrees, Rajiv’s research and practice focuses on open educational practices, student-centered pedagogies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Rajiv is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook and serves on the BC Open Education Advisory Committee. A co-author of three open textbooks in Psychology, he co-edited Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. You can find him online @thatpsychprof or thatpsychprof.com

Other works:

Bali, M., Cronin, C., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2020). Framing open educational practices from a social justice perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1): 10, pp. 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565

Jhangiani, R. S. (2019). Delivering on the promise of open educational resources: Pitfalls and strategies. In K. Zhang, C. J. Bonk, T. C. Reeves, & T. H. Reynolds (Eds.), MOOCs and Open Education Across Emerging Economies: Challenges, Successes, and Opportunities. New York: Taylor & Francis. [OA Author accepted manuscript]

Jhangiani, R. S. & Biswas-Diener, R. (2017). Open: The philosophy and practices that are revolutionizing education and science. Ubiquity Press.

Attribution

OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining  by Rajiv S. Jhangiani is published with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Copyright © 2020 by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani. Open at the Margins by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
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