Day 5 Reaction Blog
Written by Jasmine Roberts, a member of the #OpenEd20 Communications Team & Steering Committee
Willingness to grow. That is what I appreciate the most about the open education community. I’ve seen that embodied in so many ways during this year’s Open Education Conference. For example, you can see the eagerness to learn in the conference theme, reimagining open education. With that comes a call to revisit the promises of open education, to hold ourselves accountable, to be malleable, to truly serve the communities that we claim to serve, and embody a community-driven approach, one that addresses social justice, inclusion, and structural inequities.
The conference presentations made me truly think about the premise of open education, that education should be affordable, accessible, inclusive, and equitable to everyone, and how we really should be relentless in using an equity, diversity, and inclusion lens as well as a social justice approach. The topic of social justice was often repeated during the conference. Among the many presentations that discussed this issue, there were a few that stood out to me. Marco Seiferle-Valencia, an Open Education Librarian at the University of Idaho, delivered an amazing presentation titled “Looking Beyond Cost: OER as Intentionally Engaged Social Justice”. Marco argued that “open practitioners have a responsibility to specifically and decisively center systematically marginalized people, in OER content and praxis.” He also did a wonderful job of connecting and arguing for the fundamental contribution of Black feminism to open education/pedagogy and argued that open education works stretches back beyond the 1990s, largely due to the contributions of scholars of color who were already engaging in some form of open practices before it was officially recognized as such.
I also particularly enjoyed the day 4 plenary from Dr. Jacquelyn Meshelemiah and Jessie Loyer who both discussed the intersections of social justice and open education. Dr. Meshelemiah discussed equity a great deal in her talk and argued for the need to properly reward scholars for open practices, while Jessie centered indigenous narratives in her keynote, a perspective that is too often missing from open education and education more broadly.
I am excited about this call to center the social justice framework in open education work. It makes me think of how I might have related to open education in a different manner if my initial exposure to this community were not simply framed as just a textbook affordability. Open education is so much more than that.
Open education is an act of resistance.
Open education is radical.
Open education is personal.
Open education is revolutionary.
Open education is communal.
Open education is service.
Thank you to all who are committed to this hard, but imperative work.