 Hello there, I'm Dr. Kat Clement. My pronouns are they, them. I'm coming to you from the Midget State University and my talk today is going to be OER as a tool to de-center whiteness, a queer psychology case study to start off with. I am queer and trans, but I'm also white. And this video is going to represent the efforts that I've made to de-center whiteness in my queer psych class and all of the classes that I use OER. So our two goals for today are to identify OER sources that can de-center whiteness in your own disciplines. And I will talk about a few different types of disciplines in addition to our social science milieu of queer psych. And also to identify ways to center justice and liberation in your curriculum. So these are the things that I want you to be thinking about as I walk through what I did to create my queer psychology course and how I incorporated OER into that. As we're getting underway, I also want to share with you my view of liberation, active resistance and solidarity with and among socially oppressed groups. So in the context of this class, and I'm very explicit with my students as well, throughout the course, we should be striving to work toward liberation for queer folks, for trans folks, black folks, indigenous folks, disabled folks, it's all wrapped up together. So first off, a little bit of background. This is my second year presenting at the Open Ed Conference last year. I talked about my efforts at designing my human sexuality course with OER. That was my first foray into OER after my brief, brief flirtation with writing a textbook over the summer. It didn't go well, I'm glad I saw sense. And instead looked to incorporating a bunch of work that was already existing into my human sexuality course. And that was purposefully and intentionally queer inclusive. And that's what I talked about last year. And then I was excited to be able to create this new elective course, queer psychology. It's an upper level elective course within the psych program. So generally psych students, although we have a lot of double majors and minors. So it's not just folks going into psychology who would be taking this class. Similar to the problems and issues I ran into with designing or looking for human sexuality texts, with queer psych, there's really no perfect fits. There's no queer psychology textbook. There is an out of print LGBT psychology that was published in like 2010 or 2012. Lots of things have changed in the last 10 years. So there wasn't a traditional textbook put out by a traditional publisher that was easy to pull off the shelf and say, this is it. Also, even within looking at LGBTQ plus perspectives and texts and resources, a lot of the existing perspectives we have like informal textbooks and materials are still pretty normative. So a lot of experiences and research based in very white populations, cisgender populations, abled populations, assumptions of middle class. And also they assume that students themselves are cisgender and heterosexual. So that can be problematic because when you're writing to that specific type of audience as though you don't have these experiences, as though you are approaching the queer community as this foreign experience that you have no idea about, that's alienating for people who already are members of that community. And then of course COVID. COVID was not on the horizon when I submitted my request to design this course. So I needed to work with that. We are lucky enough that we have, we've got a great administration. But what this means for teaching during COVID at my university right now is that we're predominantly on campus where possible. But because psychology has an online program and there were several online only students who expressed a desire to take this course but couldn't come in person, I ended up deciding to make this a simultaneous delivery of online and asynchronous and also in-person synchronous. So that was also in the back of my mind as I was designing this. So I had some specific things that I wanted to have on my wish list as it were. I wanted my course materials to be dynamic, customizable and have free content. I did not want my students to have to purchase anything for this course. I also wanted to be centering queer and trans people of color. Their voices, their experiences, their liberation. And similarly, I wanted an emphasis on liberation and social justice. I'm very fortunate that my colleagues in my department, this is also justice and diversity and multiculturalism is a major value that we hold in our curriculum and in our program. And finally, as I was thinking about well, what kind of assessments do I want? I can't just say, oh, you've learned something, go forth and put it into action. I wanted them to do things. So even if a lot of the module assignments ended up incorporating a lot of metacognition and reflection about what they've learned, I also wanted to have some direct action pieces to that, which I'll talk about in a minute. So as I'm creating this wish list, I'm embarking on my journey, but I wasn't starting from scratch. I did have a lot of ideas and things that I hadn't gotten to use from human sexuality, things that were a little bit more advanced. So I wasn't starting quite at the bottom of the hill. I was starting a little ways up. And the first thing that I did was set up, what do I want this course to look like? What are the major content areas that I wanted to address? So I ended up splitting the course into five modules and this first module was just foundation. So let's have a common language. Let's go through the acronym. Let's talk about what does it mean to be stealth? What does it mean to be perceived as passing? But also some theoretical foundations. What is queer psychology? What is queer theory within that? What is intersectional theory? The second module was focused on what is status quo? So what is it that we want to resist against? What have we done? What's mainstream? What's considered normal? And how have people been engaging in action to change that? So not only queer activists and trans activists and advocates, but within psychology. How have people been resisting within the discipline? And then because this is a psychology class, we have to have a module on psychological perspectives of queerness. How is sexual identity defined? How is gender identity defined? The long and unfortunate history in some cases of focusing, you know, using a deficit model to focus on what's wrong with you. You're not straight and some of the disastrous attempts to quote, fix that. Module four is gonna be all about the impact of structural oppression. So living as a member of an oppressed group, how does that impact your mental health, your physical health? What's your experience like in healthcare situations? Your experience in education, job seeking, all different kinds of things, encountering discrimination and prejudice related to homophobia and transphobia, but also intersectionally, let's put racism on top of that. Let's put ableism and sexism on top of that. And finally, the last module I wanted to end, end on a good note. So the last module concerns resilience and coping and thriving and how do we organize to create change? How do people find family and form community? So each module has an associated assignment where they are reflecting and analyzing the readings and the activities and discussions in that module, but then there are also two course projects, the media analysis paper where they are tracking the media they consume to see how much queer representation is there, what kind of queer representation is it just presence or is it stereotypical? Is it like well-rounded queer rep? And then their social change project is focused on direct action. Where are you, where are you located? Whether that's on campus, wherever that is, if you're taking this online, your job, at home with your family, where can you make change where you are? Whether that's creating information for your workplace's HR on this is how you can change your email alias to reflect your new name or challenging jokes in your friend group or so many other ideas. Like they've created pamphlets, they've come up with plans for pushing back when people dead name somebody, they've really made intentions to change. So as I mentioned, this is a simultaneous delivery course. So we've got both an on-campus, face-to-face delivery and an online asynchronous delivery. Everybody's doing the same assigned readings and videos. Everybody's doing the same assessments. But the divergence is what do I do during class? How are they going to be doing activities online? So what I ended up doing, and I was still deciding this as the semester rolled on, was I used a flipped classroom mode instead of regular lecture activities for face-to-face. It's all, let's apply this, let's do some work. So it's a lot more discussion-based and a lot more creating meaning. So it's not strict open pedagogy, but a lot of it is, let's come up with a consensus, let's have a conversation about this. And that is also translatable to we use Microsoft Teams for the course. So the online-only students do that same work on Teams. One thing that I also wrestled with was this is a psychology class, but it's a queer psychology class. And queer theory, queerness, is all about blurring boundaries. And tossing out categories, like let's just get rid of those boundaries. So I really decided to embrace an interdisciplinary focus. So based on intersectional theory and queer theory, I also brought in some media studies. We talk a lot about philosophy. Gonna bring in some literature and poetry. But also like bringing in application. So a lot of these students are going to be going to some kind of service providing position. So whether they want to stay as clinicians, whether they want to be domestic abuse advocates, whether they want to be nurses or in some other healthcare provision, they're going to be providing service. So we also want to be much like be applied in our focus. And finally, discussing how activism happens and how we can advocate for clients who are queer and trans, even if the students themselves aren't. So here are some examples of materials in some of my modules. I've got research articles that are either review or that are like empirical research articles. I also found an LGBTQ plus studies textbook, which is great for some background information. It is LGBTQ plus studies. So it is social science, but it is not psychology focused. I also brought in voices of queer and trans folks of color. So button poetry, slam poetry, medium articles and posts. So how can you do this? Where can you find and how can you evaluate what you might need to do something similar? So some questions to ask as you're evaluating these potential OER, who created this? Is the creator queer and trans or trans? Are they a person of color? Relatedly, who's experience is being documented? Is it a white person talking about a black person's experience? Or is it an own voices situation where the person who created it is also talking about their own experience? Who is visually depicted? What faces are we seeing? And also what language is used? And I have an example of that in a minute. Another question, how academic do you want it? We know that academics is historically based in white supremacy. We've got lots of norms that are entrenched in racism designed to keep specific people out. So do we want to reinforce that? Or do we wanna open the door a little bit to not just dense textbooks? So certainly there's open access textbooks out there that you can pull from. Lots of Creative Commons license things, bringing in academic journal articles for specific topics. Academics write a lot of blogs. I've even brought in tweet threads written by some academic folks and also just some queer folks talking about being queer. And also lots of academic folks happy to do guest lectures or Zoom lectures. Here's an example of me trying to figure out if there's any kind of open access textbook that I could use in my class before I found the LGBTQ plus studies one. So I searched for queer on the OER Commons site, come up with three results because of course, right? Not many people do in queer stuff, that's fine. So this is the Intro to Sociology open-sex textbook. They've got a section on Intro to Gender, Sex and Sexuality. Great, this sounds at least like some foundational stuff. Wonderful, let me look at the learning objectives here. Get a little closer. Define a differentiate between sex and gender, okay. Define and discuss what is meant by gender identity. Understand and discuss the role of homophobia and heterosexism in society. And already I'm thinking is there an intersectional piece to this? Are we gonna talk about the amplification of some of this with racism and ableism? And then we get to distinguish the meanings of transgender, transsexual and homosexual identities, which is a red flag to me. This is written by possibly, probably written by a cis head person who let me make an assumption who is okay with using terms like transsexual and homosexual, which to me are nails on a chalkboard. So I pull out of this and I think this is not a good fit for me. Everybody is going to make their own decisions about that. I am very intentional and deliberate in the language that I use. These words come with a lot of baggage, so particularly pathologized baggage. So I really do try to be intentional in the information that I give my students and in modeling things for them. But there is also lots of non-academic blogs and sites that you might explore if you want to get those own voices those own experiences represented. Every day feminism is a good one. Wear your voice and bitch magazine. I've asked for them because these venues really do prioritize voices of color. Medium is also a good place to check out individual contributors. They're writing. You might also bring in some video content. There's lots of short documentaries. Vice, for example, has some, I've used a couple of vice documentaries or just like news clips about Pride, for example. Poetry, TED Talks, really helping to emphasize the lived experience of queer and trans people of color. If you are outside social science, maybe you've got discipline-specific tutorials or videos that you might want to incorporate. And then speaking of that, what if you, I mean, it's relatively easy if you have something like psychology or sociology or somewhere in the humanities, that's easy to bring in queer and trans voices of color. Maybe less so in other disciplines. So let's talk through a few different examples and ways that you could, like topics and ways that you could incorporate things like that. So say you're in education and you're teaching your students how to be educators. Culturally responsive pedagogy, how do we meet students where they're at and incorporate their experiences? When we talk about assessment, what's the history of intelligence testing? Why do we need to separate students into intelligence groups? What are the consequences, both historically and today? What about gifted programs? Special education, mainstreaming. Residential schools, also a very salient legacy and both historical and present day trauma right now in Canada, but also, of course, we had residential schools in the United States as well. What if you're in a variety of STEM? Well, even though it can be easy to think, oh, I can't spotlight queer and trans people of color in STEM, but think about who is writing the assigned readings that you have and who's being left out. There are plenty of scientists out there who've done some good stuff, but have some pretty problematic ideologies. I mean, scientific racism is an absolute thing. That's absolutely something to address with students, but also not only the content, but activism, advocacy around access, accessibility for people who have disabilities, but also for class related issues, like how do we get tech and science and medicine to lower class people? We can talk about global poverty. The big divide between here in the States, folks talking about a booster shot for COVID when there are billions of people on this earth who have not had the opportunity to have one vaccine. What about business? Well, again, more about class disparities. How do we approach credit scores, for example, who, redlining, mortgages, subprime mortgages? I mean, just a variety of things to discuss and talk about, but also how do people in lower income communities in poverty and communities of color, how do they band together in mutual aid to protect and provide for each other? So there's a lot of ideas and ways that you can incorporate a more inclusive lens, a more intersectional lens, regardless of the discipline that you're in. So some final thoughts and some best practices, as with everything, right? The principle of garbage in, garbage out. It's important to be intentional, right? OER offers so much flexibility. You can be flexible to meet the needs of your students, of your pedagogy. You can update things. It's the course changes. I'm still finding things and adding things. I have required assigned readings in videos, but then I have so many. Also, if you're interested in this, here's a bunch of other resources. I don't know that the students particularly like that because they might feel a little bit pressured to explore all of the things that I have there, but I just can't. It's hard for me to figure out what to leave out. If you're interested in writing supplemental texts or maybe you're working to write your own OER textbook, you can start contributing your own work in chunks. Some tips for doing this whole process. Have a plan before you start. Being intentional, even like having a flow chart, good to know what you're getting into. Don't try to do everything at once though. Go in batches like reserve an hour, every couple of days to try to search for things. It's great if you can find a couple of spots that you can pull a lot from. Depending on your discipline, you might not have that ability, but also you can make notes about where you want to revisit. You can save bookmarks. You can make a spreadsheet. I mean, again, the possibilities are endless. So to recap, it's good to have a plan when you're starting out incorporating OER into your course. There's really a lot of potential sources out there. And in the Dropbox folder that I have on the session page, there is a document in there with a bunch of links to a bunch of different things, including visuals. It's awesome to be able to personalize OER for your course. Even if it's not a course focus of queer and trans experiences, you can still slide things in and be more inclusive overall. I also want to recognize that de-centering the way sysad experiences and perspectives is an ongoing process. I'm not at a point where I think it's perfect. I'm just going to keep working toward it and centering those voices. And now it's your turn. So check out all of those resources or at least some of those resources and see what you could incorporate in your own class. Thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions, please do reach out by email katharine.clementepimidgistate.edu and I'm also on Twitter way too much. My handle is at krclement and I look forward chatting with you.