Suzanne Wakim from Butte Community College has done so much for Open Educational Resources and RLOE. It was nice to recognize the name Rachel Arteaga and Mandeep Grewal in the Open Ed 2021 recorded session entitled “Strategies for Assessing and Adapting OER for Inclusion: A Case Study.” Rachel Arteaga is a Librarian at Butte College and Mandeep Grewal is a Biology Professor at Butte College in California. Grewal obtained a grant to work on this project, and Arteaga helped. Grewal worked with Wakim to create a Human Biology OER textbook with help from the Academic Senate of California Community Colleges (ASCCC) grant. They put the text on LibreTexts, which I didn’t know you could do! Grewal applied for another ASCCC grant to make the book more inclusive… but how was their question and challenge. With the help of the Gender and Sexuality Team, Grewal created a survey to identify gaps and improve inclusivity. The survey had nine questions. Questions included “On a scale of 1 to 5, how inclusive do you find this book compared to an ideal textbook?” and “How well do the images reflect our student body” What recommendations do you have for making the images more inclusive?”Responses helped identify opportunities for increasing diversity and representation throughout the textbook. Grewal began noticing a lack of diverse names too: names from different cultures. I thought it was really neat that Grewal brought their passion for food and heritage from India into the examples of the textbook. In addition to gender-neutral characters in the case studies, Grewal purposely included characters with different abilities. In the sexuality unit, Grewal included case studies with various abilities and names. ASCCC OERI, mentioned Artega, is developing a process for improving OER. The framework they developed has components to “restore and include” voices that have historically been marginalized. The four components for the framework are:
- illustrations and photos
- example names
- gender-inclusive language and use of pronouns
- historical, pioneering, or current researchers/studies in the field
The rubric components included criteria for references and appropriate terminology. The audit framework is detailed and adaptable for a variety of open textbooks at other institutions.
