 And please go ahead, Sarah. So, and this is our presentation is one thing leads to another so we're going to kind of do a little bit of storytelling. I'm a story of art into genetic and open pedagogy and K-12 education. And then he's our introduction. Yes, and my name is Dr. Connie Blomgren and I'm an associate professor at Athabasca University. And, Sarah, if you want to introduce yourself. Sure. I live in Denver, Colorado. I'm a teacher librarian by profession and I'm also a doctoral student at Athabasca University studying OER and open pedagogy. Yes, and Sarah is full disclosure here. She is my, she is my grad student and I'm working her, we're working with her to help shape a very interesting dissertation around the idea of storytelling and OER and what this means. So, because Athabasca University is a national university and we're distributed and have always been a distance education provider, our land acknowledgement is somewhat different than many other institutions. So, don't say, that's the first Cree word, and I'm not going to move into the others because I haven't spoken much Cree for a very long time but that is where I first began teaching was in traditional Cree Treaty 8 land. But Athabasca University, respectively acknowledges that we are on and work on the traditional lands of the indigenous peoples of Canada. That is the Inuit, the First Nations and the Métis of Canada. And we honor the ancestry heritage and gifts of the indigenous peoples and gifts and give thanks to them. And then because I am distributed and this project that Sarah and I are going to be talking about is so tied to the land and the place. And it seems appropriate to also give a Blackfoot Nitsiapi acknowledgement here. So I live and work on the traditional lands of the Nitsiapi people of the Canadian plains and pay respect to the Blackfoot people past, present and future, while recognizing and respecting their cultural heritage beliefs and relationship to the land. Victoria is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. And the image is of Waterton Lakes National Park, which is an international peace park, because it shares the border with the United States and Montana. I can see to Montana from where I'm sitting right now currently so there's many layers of connectivity in this presentation and in this work. And then I recognize and respect the Cheyenne and Arapaho cultural heritage beliefs and relationship to the land who are the original stewards of this land. I also wish to acknowledge all other indigenous tribes and nations who call Colorado home. It is because of their sacrifices and hardships that we are able to be here to learn and share knowledge to advance educational equity. And so what's interesting is that, of course, Colorado is along the Rocky Mountains in the United States and I'm on the along the Rocky Mountains in Canada so in indigenous understanding of North America. The Rocky Mountains are considered the spine of the world. So our project is really around a partnership engagement grant that was begun in 2000 and well we got our funding in 2019 actually. And it was to help support a nonprofit group, sort of a loose group of people but primarily spearheaded by a woman named Joyce Sassy was very interested in advancing the legacy of a Nora Brown. And Nora Brown just as it says here was an artist and she worked in painting but also graphic design she actually illustrated many textbooks that were used to help children in the 40s and 50s and into the 60s understand indigenous culture. And because she decided, although she took her art education in Toronto and studied with the group of seven famous group of Canadian landscape painters. She, for various reasons, returned back to Fort McLeod in Southwest Alberta. And she painted and lived her full life here in basically, you know, far away from the happenings of Toronto or Montreal on the art scenes there. So she's not well known but yet her uvra is very beautiful. So we'll just take a minute to enjoy some of her paintings. This one is called prairie prairie chicken dance. This is held by the Glenbow Museum. Oh, that's fine. Next one. This is of Galardia or sometimes called brown eyed Susan. And it was interesting because this is a painting of she did about 300 paintings of wildflowers in about three years as a commission with the Glenbow Museum, which is in Calgary. And so some of those wildflowers are now extinct. They're no longer able to be seen. But when I showed this image to Sarah and I said, do you recognize that flower and she just nodded and said yes. And that's the nature of, you know, the land and the flowers and the animals that live along the Rocky Mountains, until you get very far south. A lot of the plants and animals are very similar. Next slide then. And then this one here is sort of shows the landscape that would be very familiar for an aura to look out upon and is also familiar for myself. This is what I see. This is where I'm where the planes meet or the prairies meet the mountains in the foothills. And that picture is looking south. And again, if you look right sort of at the very center where the mountains are. That is Waterton Lakes National Park. And this is an area that I know I spent a lot of time painting and exploring and just enjoying and, as I mentioned, it's international peace park. Where there's a shared international boundary and national parks. Glacier National Park in the United States. So this extension of friendship. Next slide. Now in, in addition to being a painter she was also a very interesting woman and if you can imagine in the 30s and in the 40s she collected up all these different stories from different sources so from when they had the palacer expedition. They would the British brought botanists who would document the land and the plants, and she accessed that material and created what was called old man's garden. That has been just re issued in this year 2020. And it's a beautiful collection of quote gossip about wildflowers. Next slide. So the project, we started in 2019. We had a free PD workshop and we started trying to develop awareness of this entire collection and the legacy of not just the artwork but all the graphic illustration that Nora did and then also how she was very much what I would call a strong woman. She never married, and yet she was very much dedicated to her parents she took care of them. So in that care, care, keeping capacity, understood many aspects of family life. And so we had bookmarks library kits trying to develop some awareness and interest in developing or and professional learning network around Nora and her legacy. So of course this dives into OER and OEP open educational practices and this is Hagerty's eight attributes of open pedagogy. I encourage you to take a deeper look into that it's great resource, and it helps explain so much of all the moving parts of this project. Sarah. We decided obviously, oh my gosh, COVID hit everybody sideways. And so some of the work that we had planned to do with the wildflower festival in Waterton Lakes National Park, again around developing awareness and helping teachers be more aware of her legacy had to be postponed potentially. So now we're looking at looking at some virtual micro professional learning around OER and Nora Brown citizen science, and then meeting Canada's truth and reconciliation calls to action. So sometimes a pause or a delay or an interruption can actually be a good thing because when I talk about citizen science there was there's been a very nice app that's been developed by the native plant council of Alberta and the biodiversity. I forget the full name. Anyways, it's to help document plants and animal sightings here in Alberta so very nice open science citizen science data activity that has just sort of started so you know the timing now sort of fits up with them so that can be very exciting for us. Next. And one thing just before we jump into Sarah she's going to always find you can just keep it there Sarah. I was just going to say during the summer part of my COVID coping was to actually go out and make photographs of the wildflowers that I know that Nora painted. And I have put some of those up on the website as openly licensed images to facilitate teachers and students wherever who are looking at the Nora Brown website, and maybe being able to like in the middle of January in Canada of course it's cold 40 below you're not going to be finding a beautiful wildflower, and even some some of the wildflowers only bloom for one day. So, like blue eyed grass, just, you know you're just lucky to see it because it's just blooming today, it won't be there tomorrow, and it wasn't there yesterday. So some of the wildflowers are so fragile so that was my way of thinking, what would have Nora done during COVID. And I thought, she would have been out there studying the flowers. And that's what I did with my photographs. So Sarah for you. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about, like the teacher perspective on things. I've been a teacher librarian for quite a while. Just looking at some of the numbers this comes from the baby analytics report from 2020 regarding curriculum in K 12 schools. And you can see that there's like a 5% that's OER. You know, the lion share comes from the three main publishers and this is this is from the United States. So this. This was a survey of over 2100 educators representing all 50 states and over 1300 school districts, but Connie. I showed me that the three big publishers that we have here in the United States are also the big publishers in Canada, but I do like seeing a little bit of green on this. And also they're reporting indicated kind of awareness of we are and so you can see here, according to this survey that about 31% of of K 12 educators meaning teachers and district administration and also school administration have an awareness are very aware or somewhat aware of OER but you know sometimes the self the self reported awareness might not ensure that that educators fully understand the capabilities of OER and may not be fully aware of the licensing. As we've heard in some of the other presentations and so thus like OER won't be able to be used to its full extent in reusing and revising remixing redistributing and retaining so. And again further kind of probing into their into their information you can see that the educators do indeed have a pretty substantial knowledge of copyright and public domain but those creative commons licenses which are those licenses that allow the use of the OER materials is considerably less. So, the, the team, then corrected for awareness of we are with creative commons and you can see that it moved then from from the 30% to 31% to 23%. So there's considerably less so there's lots of there's lots of room for growth and lots of opportunity. And so kind of, you know the question that I have in being an educator a librarian and someone who is super interested in OER. And, and really interested in open educational practices, things that were supported by this in our Brown project. And also we think that like, probably something that would be super important for this would be professional learning for K12 educators at all levels right so for teachers for district staff and for and for the building administrators. So that knowledge of we are can expand and also kind of like how we are can be used to foster a more open pedagogy for all of the students. So, a lot of research also speaks to this and so this is from Dr. Vladimir she and she did a study regarding teacher professional learning in public schools in Brazil, and found that this was indeed so that there was a professional development was was given kind of in a step by step hands on way that teachers became more engaged with OER and grew in confidence and that it was important for them to have a supportive school environment in order for the that to be successful, and then also just kind of thinking of important professional development components for K12 educators. You know this comes from human hyzer initial males report, and just kind of thinking about like what are the things that need to happen in order to support K12 educators to to grow in their OER skills is, you know, having having it being something experiential and project and problem based guidance for for establishing PLNs and and also especially in digital environments, and then thinking about the learning objectives around basics of OER and open licensing and kind of moving from the textbook idea into open pedagogy and defining quality and so these are all kind of themes that like connect then back to the story of of the inora brown project. And so I'll turn this over to Connie. Sarah. So, yeah, what does effective professional learning look like during COVID-19 I think it has to be flexible and it has to be free guided yet participatory and supportive PLNs responsive to the emerging needs so again some flexibility there, creative and generative topics so I think this is, you know, we all know that everyone is feeling stressed in so many ways. And this, as I said, I know when I decided, and I took my daughter, who was, you know, came home from university kind of feeling quite blue about everything in April. And the two of us, we went out and we made these photographs and I just said, you know, we've, we've just got to keep moving on. And of course the flowers are beautiful, they're generative. And most everybody who ever sees the work of inora brown they just go wow, this is so much. So, online resources for educator CC learning, both Sarah and I took the creative common certificate course over the summer as part of the project. That's increased our confidence and our knowledge about how to navigate some of the challenges working with a project like this because these images are actually many, not the images but the original paintings are either held in private collections or in the glimpo collection. And it was through the work of Joyce sassy the woman who created so much interest in the Nora Brown and the website and who has just been this total fan girl this is what happens when you start on Nora Brown you become a fan girl. So, Sarah is a fan girl now and so am I. And Joyce was probably the head fan girl, but you know, Joyce actually worked with the glimpo museum to digitize the entire Nora Brown collection. And so you can go and purchase a digital file from them. But even in creating this presentation, if you go to the one that we have shared in the Google Docs, you will find that there will only be a link to those images the beautiful paintings that we saw, we can share as an educational aspect, but the permissions are not that we can just, you know, allow you to access those those files that we have permission to use because it's educational. So there's this dancing and dodging and then of course this idea of non derivative. So there's lots of, as I say, creative problem solving that we've been doing as we go through for many reasons. So, thank you all I've enjoyed presenting Sarah any closing thoughts. So but I mean just kind of like how our, our title is one thing leads to another in in discussing this project and creating this presentation and in all of our conversations like it's amazing how all of the little stories like one, one thing does lead to another which is organic. Right, and lady and another comment I wanted to say one another thread that I'll just mention is that we had blackfoot elder Shirley crochet shoe, who was she was there and provided a opening prayer for our original September PD day. And she's another fan girl of a Nora Brown, and she has also agreed to participate in providing the indigenous blackfoot name for the flowers that we're putting up on the Nora Brown website. And if she has additional knowledge that she wants to share. She will be providing that as well. I mean there's all these layers and timing I it's always fascinating to me how the pieces come together the timing and just how like when I say about the citizen science and the app that was developed. And it was exciting to hear this young, you know, 30, 30 year old fellow I guess I shouldn't really call him young but whatever. He looked young to me on the zoom call. Anyways, he was just excited about citizen science and excited about the potential of this app to have people tag identification of flowers and biodiversity of, you know, the animals in Alberta. And a year ago that wasn't in play yet so it's just been recently released and so there's all these. As we say one thing leads to another lots of interesting connections. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you what a beautiful presentation. Everything that I love bundling the little package and with an open bow, even an open bow on top of it the paintings were beautiful. The wildflowers the photos everything about it I just love it. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing. And unfortunately we don't have time for questions but we do have a space for the communication to continue.