Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity (BranchEd) provides support for faculty at minority-serving institutions (MSI). Aubree Evans is the director of the BIRCH Professional Learning Center at Branch Ed and presented at Open Ed 2021. The session was entitled “Teaching the Teachers of Future Teachers to Design Inclusive Instructional OER.” In 2019 they conducted focus groups with 19 MSI educator preparatory faculty and found that educators wanted to “center diverse perspectives, be culturally responsive and sustaining, be accessible, be practice-based, have variety, be current and high quality, model OER use for teacher candidates so that they can apply in their own practice, and be collaborative.” To achieve these goals, Evans mentioned they started with webinars to teach OER skills and evaluating OER and authoring. They also shared their OER hub on OER Commons. Evans also mentioned they had multi-week faculty OER development institutes they could use in their own classrooms. BranchEd developed an Equity Rubric for OER Evaluation with four dimensions and curated an OER E-Book entitled “Preparing Inclusive Educators.” Evans mentioned that there is a gap at the higher level of materials for teacher educators. Because of the diversity of faculty at MSIs, Evans stated that BranchEd helps model and diversify inclusive OERs. The content development institutes helped to teach OER. The institute materials are on OER commons and created by faculty at MSIs! These resources include a rubric to evaluate OER images for diversity and bias! In their second cohort, twenty-four resources were developed. Pedagogy of Hope was one that was developed and has an introduction and three units: content, activities, and assessments. This template was created after the first cohort. Evans was a Quality Matters reviewer and infused some elements in the course template. The activities template includes ideas for multiple points of access for learners. I explored some of the resources shared and would like to spend more time… and use them! Also, OER Commons has some fantastic resources! I wonder if we could adapt, remix, and create some for MORE?
Evans also explained the Equity Rubric for OER Evaluation the Branched OER Brain Trust created with the purpose of evaluating design materials. The goal is to develop more equitable and inclusive materials. The group developed four dimensions: learner-centered, criticality, culturally-sustaining, and UDL. They are also developing a self-paced course to learn how to review resources using the rubric and earn a badge. I want to do this! The goal is to create more robust and inclusive resources. This presentation made me rethink how we can use OER Commons and learn from resources already developed. This may be useful to RLOE and for MORE.
