Tonight we ended the workweek by watching an Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Beyond “Open”: Intersections with Accessibility, Cultural Responsiveness, and Broader Educational Goals.” Ethan Senack is the Chief of Staff of ISKME and Mindy Boland is the director of OER Services at ISKME. I did not know ISKME also runs OER Commons! Senack began by explaining that Openness does not inherently equal equity and justice. Senack also shared data that indicate 94% of teachers say they are willing to teach or support the implementation of anti-racist curriculum. Boland noted that ISKME offers several services for libraries and research. They worked with CAST to develop ePub 3 with Braile and culturally-responsive teaching resources. ISKME has worked on accessibility metadata standards too. This is good to know as we have been confused about labels lately! Boland explained that they have refined based on feedback culturally-responsive training. Senack shared the lesson learned from culturally responsive teaching sessions. I was involved in a pilot and their accessibility guide examples. Senack explained that messaging is critical and culturally responsive teaching messaging often gets confounded with critical race theory teaching because they share the acronym. For messaging, Senack recommends:
- Bring the content: show the benefits of culturally responsive teaching.
- Center the impact: culturally responsive teaching is about providing an honest education that values all students.
- State the facts: support educators to meet their educational goals and standards.
Boland shared tools for developing and evaluating OER. The first one was a framework to address bias and mentioned that ISKME is working on their own framework. A rubric for developing equity for OER Evaluation by BranchED was also shared. The last resource was the New America Culturally Responsive Teaching guide. For their lessons learned, Boland shared their work on accessibility: weigh the differences between born-accessible and retrofitted and work towards better, not perfect were messages shared. I thought it was important that Senack mentioned that the goal posts do move as we learn more about accessibility and raise awareness of OER. I did not know that they had partnered with CAST and also worked with the OpenAuthor Accessibility Checker. Senack ended with some questions to consider including what resonated/resonates with you, what resources or types of resources are you looking for on these topics, and what other interactions or lessons. My goals are to use as well as develop OERs. I should and commit to developing better OER. I hope to do better with BIT 295.
