Hear from our Summer 2021 Pedagogy Lab Fellows on their Open Educational Resources
This summer, Pedagogy Fellows at BBQ+ are creating short (5-10 minute) audio shorts that blend guided meditation, storytelling, oral history, and podcast. In a time of online and hybrid learning, this gives students a mental break from both screens and their environments. Students, like their parents, teachers, and professors, are eager for ways to engage that provide both stimulation and escape. Students experiencing multiple traumas and crises struggle to effectively take in and retain information. These types of open educational resources (OER) account for that ongoing trauma, ensuring students have the opportunity to be grounded in their bodies and mindful of their mental state.
Hear from our fellows below on their OER projects!
Listen on Soundcloud.
David Diaz
What drew you to work on an open educational resource (OER) project?
I was interested in an OER project because I am passionate about removing barriers to education for marginalized people. Part of that endeavor requires making educational resources available to people free of charge. Another aspect of the OER project that appeals to me is the ability to use audio content as a pedagogical tool. Audio has the potential to reach learners that written materials do not, so I am excited to help expand the sensory modalities that educators can use to include a wider variety of strategies for understanding the world.
What will your OER explore?
My OER will feature music from Black performers in the lands we now call the Americas to reflect on the Black diaspora and shared strategies of resilience against oppression. I will call attention to the practice of call and response, which comes out of West African spiritual traditions, as it arises in several different contexts to demonstrate the historical importance of collectivity in confronting enslavement and colonization. The goal of the project is for listeners to be able to reflect on their own histories of transnational migration and how those histories are shared with and diverge from other people’s histories.
Who do you hope will be able to use your OER, and for what purpose?
I hope that college students who are beginning to explore the intersection of history, African American studies, and ethnomusicology will become attuned to the cruciality of call and response in various musical traditions. By drawing students’ attention to the lineage behind musical practices such as call and response, the project will encourage students to listen for the echoes of pivotal historical moments in the world around them, as well as the resonances and dissonances that arise in diaspora.
Dr. Ángel Gonzalez
What drew you to work on an open educational resource (OER) project?
I have worked in a variety of roles within the community college context. My experiences and those I witnessed with students inspired my passion for this work. In particular I worked with my queer and trans students who lack visibility and institutional support, learning about the need to provide resources where they are learning about their stories, making meaning of who they are, and thus providing access to opportunities to share collective space to be.
What will your OER explore?
In this capacity of my professional but also personal experience, I want to provide our queer and trans Latinx students an opportunity to feel validated in their existence and ways of knowing. Through queer chisme, I hope I can create a space to process, heal, and feel love collectively.
Who do you hope will be able to use your OER, and for what purpose?
I hope practitioners who work within community colleges can begin to address the dire gap in support for queer and trans Latinx students in order to validate their academic success, but ultimately, recognize their existence at our campuses.
Charlie Amáyá Scott
What drew you to work on an open educational resource (OER) project?
Everyone should be able to learn and access knowledge without restrictions. Much of the higher educational system relies on academic journals and published books, which makes education financially inaccessible for many students, especially if the library does not have a copy and interlibrary loan takes some time. Not to mention, folks learn and engage with knowledge differently, and so OERs are a possibility to engage with knowledge in a creative and accessible format for many.
What will your OER explore?
My initial OER will explore the internal conflict with decolonization among Indigenous youth who are learning and engaging with theory from an external source of knowledge while connecting their decolonial desires and aspirations with personal and communal experiences.
The second OER will ground a mindfulness practice through local sounds from my own community and invite listeners to engage in a practice of reciprocity and engagement with land and history.
Who do you hope will be able to use your OER, and for what purpose?
I hope that this work inspires the next generation of Indigenous scholars to engage with theory in a creative format that is accessible for many and is informed by their own personal and communal experiences. I also hope that many folks desiring for a more just and liberating education intend to share and engage with these OER to be critical of what education has been and imagine what it could be.
Destiny Hemphill
What drew you to work on an open educational resource (OER) project?
I am interested in how we can use OER as tools to practice critical pedagogy. As we struggle against increased educational privatization, austerity, and manufactured scarcity, I wanted to experiment in creating materials that support learners’ access by reimagining how and which knowledge is shared.
What will your OER explore?
Using poetry and meditation, my OER invites learners to explore how grief shows up in their bodies in the face of oppression and unspeakable brutality. Further, it invites learners to cultivate loving attention to that grief as they figure out how to be in solidarity with various liberation struggles.
Who do you hope will be able to use your OER, and for what purpose?
This OER is a love offering to Black folks and non-Black people of color in late-high school, early college, organizing communities, or in the streets throwing down. May this OER be a balm to them and the grief that emerges as they become more aware of how their lives and those around them are structured historically and presently by oppression.
Tatiana Bryant
What drew you to work on an open educational resource (OER) project?
I support OER adoption and creation by faculty in my daily work as an academic librarian, I study OER as a researcher, and I have always incorporated existing OER into my teaching. I am grateful that this project invites me to step outside of my advocacy wheelhouse by becoming an OER creator.
What will your OER explore?
My first OER project centers the oral testimony of a WWII Japanese internment survivor and select soundscapes to explore her memory and experiences of xenophobia while a college student. My second project memorializes a major Black historical figure by incorporating diasporic soundscapes and challenging my audience to counter anti-Blackness.
Who do you hope will be able to use your OER, and for what purpose?
My hope is that audiences, especially high school and college students, can experience these OERs as an invitation to situate themselves in history and our contemporary moment, inspiring more empathy and self-compassion.