I have now watched several Open Ed 2021 sessions about teaching languages using Open Educational Resources (OER). However, I have not learned what people are doing for teaching Portuguese. The session entitled “A Research Landscape on OER in Brazil: The Teaching of First and Foreign Languages” was presented by Terezinha Marcondes Diniz Biazi, a Ph.D. student in applied linguistics at the State University of Campinas – UNICAMP with advisor Rodrigo Lima Lopes. Their aim was to present the state-of-the-art for teaching Portuguese in Brazil. Their research objectives were to learn what has been done on this topic. Their research question was: “What is our Brazilian national research scenario on OER in the field of teaching first (L1) and foreign languages (FL)?” They used the Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and academic journal databases. They linked their databases on Github. They found 25 OER productions, most from the southern region of the country. Diniz Biazi noted that the South has university with an applied linguistics program. The third question was “what are the research investigation contexts?” Most (20) were in-service development for language teachers and pre-service language teaching education had five. “What are the research themes and objects?” was the last research question. They created a concept map to illustrate what they have been doing so far for OER in applied linguistics from 2013-2020. The concept map focused on 25 studies. Some final considerations mentioned by Diniz Biazi were: inclusion of research with a focus on Open Education and OER in applied linguistics graduate programs. There is a need for the integration of OER study, practices, and adoption at the pre-service language teacher education level. Finally, for in-service language teaching programs, there is the need for OER projects. The article on this study was published in Portuguese. I haven’t thought about a review or meta-analysis of OER in a specific field. This may be an interesting and useful approach for some of the topics we are interested in learning more about and working on.
The next session we watched was entitled “Care in the Open: A Framework for Practicing an Ethics of Care” by Caroline Sinkinson and Merinda McCure from the University of Colorado Libraries. McCure shared a land acknowledgement and introduced the framework they have worked on with Caroline Sinkinson. The guiding question they focused on was “How can we center, communicate, and realize an ethic of care in our open education work?” They began describing the history of care ethics. They referred to Bernice Fisher and Joan Toronto who define care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as possible.” They also used the ethical qualities of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness for their work. McCure explained that they expanded by adding practitioner enactments such as attentiveness subcategory empathy. Sinkinson then spoke about the educator perspectives they gained through interviews with local educators. The initial analysis of the conversations did generate a few themes:
- Giving students choice and ownership of their participation.
- Obtaining content and permission from learneres.
- Being transparent about the intention of open practices.
- Resisting an expert stance and hierarchical relationships.
- Cultivating empathy for learners and teachers.
The themes, explained McCure, were inter-related. I appreciate how they spoke about obtaining content and permission from the learners by clarifying how to opt-in or out, discussing risk, and establishing clear agreements and documents of content. Two examples described were to model the teacher’s unknowing, uncertainty, and curiosity; and approaching this as an opportunity for transparent guidelines and expectations. McCure shared several quotes and analyzed them. They are developing a framework of values and examples of practitioner enactments and prompts for reflection based on interviews. They see the next step as conducting interviews more broadly to refine the questions and incentivize the use of the framework. The presenters seek feedback now. I wonder how they are going to extend and refine the framework now… and, importantly, incentivize its use. What would be necessary to broader the use of a framework like this?
