 I'm, like, looking far and wide. I appreciate you coming today. And we're going to go ahead and get started. Our presentation is about considering your positionalities in conjunction with open education, sacred knowledge, and indigeneity. And this is Emily Bradshaw. I'm Stephanie Robertson. We'll introduce ourselves more in a little bit. But we wanted to set some context for what we're talking about today. We'll talk about the study in depth in just a little bit, but just briefly to set the context for our presentation and our research. We are OER enthusiasts and practitioners from Biuyi, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. And we set out to do an IRB study about faculty adoption. And we didn't set out to do a study about indigeneity. But our population set was wonderfully diverse from our faculty, from many different cultures, perspectives, ages, different levels of working at the university, like in terms of how long you worked there and what type of adjunct or full-time tenured. So through our data set, what we'll be talking about today is something we did not anticipate. Oh, thank you for moving so I can see your beautiful faces. Something we did not anticipate that came from. We had about a third of our participants were our indigenous and otherwise a very diverse group as well. But the indigenous participants, something came out in the qualitative data and in the communities of practice that we didn't anticipate. And so we're going to be talking about positionalities today because we are coming from the position of being non-indigenous and just doing a training and a study to try to broaden horizons on campus and teaching what is OER, how to find it, how to create it, and talking about cultural competency when creating it as well. But some interesting things emerged. And there's a little bit of a vulnerable share to tell you, oh, we didn't anticipate this when we were so well-intended and well-meaning. But we hope that it will be a value for folks here today. And we thank you for your generosity in listening to us. But first, some acknowledgments. And we understand that an acknowledgment has need for reciprocity and humility. So although we do want to acknowledge the land that we're located and centered on here today for the conference and the land that we work and live on on the island of Oahu in the Kau'ila region, it's a small island. And we live on the countryside of the island. And it is the land of Kanaka Maoli, the native Hawaiians. We are not native Hawaiians. So we are transplants. We are visitors. And we're very grateful for our indigenous colleagues who have welcomed us so graciously. We also want to acknowledge a group called OER Fellows. And we encourage all of you to apply if you haven't participated in it already. It's great. It's a year-long mentorship supporting you and your research and maybe even giving a stipend if you submit something for publication. And they supported us to come here to the conference today. And finally, BYU Hawaii, who also supported our research. I'll introduce myself to you. I'm Emily Bradshaw with BYU Hawaii. I have been teaching in the English department there for the past 17 years. And I'm Stephanie Robertson. I've been teaching in the English department. Math is hard since 2009. And then since 2022, I was full-time faculty and outreach in OER Library. All right, so our objectives today are to first outline the most valuable takeaways from our IRB study with international and indigenous faculty, and then to evaluate how to more sustainably share materials from diverse cultures. So as I mentioned, we had a very well-meaning, well-intended study with our friends and colleagues on campus who came to learn more about OER and if they already had an awareness to increase their knowledge and to share it together. Communities of Practice emerged from it that we'll talk about later. But we realized that from our positionality, we didn't foresee something that caused hesitation and pause during our study and redirected it. It's important for me to also note that we will be having quotes in our presentation that come straight from the indigenous voices. So we will not be representing them. They will be speaking for themselves and they've given us consent to do so. So I just want you to reflect for like 20 seconds here to yourself. You don't have to share. We'll be the ones sharing our personal shame here today. You don't have to do that. But has there ever been a time when you assumed something was no big deal? Only to find it was a big concern for someone else. This happened to us and I think sometimes, maybe some of us grew up in households. We were talking about some examples of this and one that emerged was maybe some of us grew up in households. This is common for a lot of folks that things were said that maybe now to our more trained ear later, we're like, oh, the people I grew up around maybe said something that was a little homophobic or a little racist, you know. And we gained that knowledge and that experience and that sensitivity and humility and awareness through interacting with people who have those, from those positionalities and those lived experiences. So I think we all maybe have an example of something like that or maybe something that you experienced, unfortunately, that would also fit that category. No matter how well-meaning, we all have our own positionalities and our positionalities can make us insensitive to the vulnerability of others without possibly even intending to be. And so we really have to look at like, what are the assumptions that we come into experience with and are we open and humble enough to listen and receive and make the change? Positionalities is much like identities, although identities somewhat have a little more agency sometimes. Positionality can encompass, you know, your lived experience, the socioeconomic group you grew up in, what type of religious or non-religious household did you, were you raised in your sexual orientation, gender identity, I'm thinking for me specifically, maybe my neurodivergence, you know, so these are positionalities that inform the way that we see the world through our lived experience. Okay, so just to introduce our study to you, our plan, our university on the North Shore of Hawaii is a small university. We have about 3,000 students, but within that 3,000 students, there are more than 70 different countries represented. So we have a very international student body and our faculty also is diverse and many of the people on the faculty are come from indigenous communities. So our university is very new to OER, so the work that's being done there is on awareness and faculty adoption. And so we, being enthusiastic about OER, planned a workshop for faculty. Probably many of you have done the same workshop. So our plan was to do the workshop and then throughout the semester, because we figured it would take more than just one time sit down. So we had planned throughout the semester to meet with any participants who wanted to on a one-on-one basis for continuing consultation to support them in finding and adopting OER. So we got our IRB approval in November and in January we held our workshop and then over the next four months of the semester we had those consultations and we had additional meetings with some communities of practice, some small groups that formed out of the conference and some of the issues that we've talked about today. And then at the end of the semester we did qualitative interviews. We had 28 participants in the workshop, 20 of whom we worked with on an ongoing basis and then interviewed them. So again, this was our workshop. We knew that we wanted to set up a Canvas course so that participants could continue to access content and refer back to what we had talked about in the workshop. So it was basically the OER 101. What is OER? What is this Creative Commons license? How do we license things? How do I find OER and what is open pedagogy and renewable assignments? And then we went into what are the opportunities for OER to help create culturally relevant pedagogy? And so as you can imagine from all those topics it was a jam-packed Saturday. We had the four modules, two before lunch, two after lunch, there was a lunch. We got that funded. Thank you, BYU Hawaii and the library. And but when we got to module two, here's where the day took a different direction. So we're talking about, we're doing a free ride about assignments or projects in the class. I think that's what it was that they might want to license to share globally. Here's where we went wrong and there's many ways we went wrong but this is one that I'm identifying specifically. I don't think we framed enough in our excitement and in getting through the topic of where exactly if you would license the Creative Commons a worksheet or a packet, for example, from your digital resources you've created in your Google Drive or whatever, where does that go? Who has access to it? I thought we probably just went right by it and there was a lot to absorb and so it didn't, it wasn't totally received. And so we got to this assignment and I said, well, here's an example of a packet that I did about addressing misinformation and it was an assignment I got when I was applying, I was doing a lesson plan when I was applying for the job to be full-time and they gave me the assignment since it's a religious institution to teach about how to find misinformation and how to know that it's misinformation by secular learning and by faith. So I thought, okay, I'll make a packet about that. And to me in my positionality, I just didn't think it was that big of a deal. I was like, so watch me, watch me go to Creative Commons, I'll take you through, I like the older version of how to license your stuff and I need to adapt and I need to use the newer one. But I went through and I showed them, I was like, easy as that, okay. So just grab a worksheet from your Google Drive or wherever you save things, no big deal, we're just gonna practice it or practice it in pairs. And there, and some people are like, okay, let's just trudge through this. But there was some hesitancy, particularly from, we had a lot of indigenous participants, but particularly from one, these women sitting in the back and I said, oh, do you guys need a little help? And they're like, we don't wanna do this. And I'm like, oh, oh, why? Oh, do you just wanna watch me do it or did you, I can walk you through it. They really didn't wanna do it. And we stopped, why? And from there, we entered into a very interesting, thoughtful place of sharing, a discussion. And I was so grateful, instead of feeling like, oh my gosh, we've messed up these two white girls just assuming stuff, instead of feeling like we can never do anything like this again, we're out of here, we're canceled, bye. I was ready to cancel myself. They shared, she shared, she was vulnerable and her vulnerability shared to us that as a Kanaka Maoli, an indigenous generator of ideas and ways of knowing and worksheets and things that she's created, she had stuff stolen in her very own faculty and not credited and we were all horrified and she said, well, this is not new. And I'm thinking to all of the wonderful keynote speakers we had, but I saved one of the slides and I put it in our slide deck to reference to it, the first keynote speaker, and so I'll reference him in a little bit, but he said something like, it takes a lot of courage to show up as an indigenous person continually in these spaces because we have been hurt. And that was something from our positionality, I'm embarrassed to say, we didn't even anticipate because we just thought, no big deal, just practice doing it on this worksheet or whatever. We didn't think about it, but it ended up being a very thoughtful time of sharing and those perspectives and the two ways of seeing and knowing that we've been talking about this week. And I'm so grateful. She was apologetic the rest of the day. Oh, I derailed your, I'm like, no, you didn't. It would have been really boring. You guys can learn this stuff on your own. This is what we need to talk about. And it really enriched our communities of practice moving forward. And I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful because I'll share a quote from Maya Angelou later about when you know more, you do better, right? Think Heaven's Now, we have that partnership, that understanding, hopefully that reciprocity to move forward in a more sustainable way for everyone on our campus. Oh, so that's me. So consider your positionalities, your own, right? And we just, I don't need to say a lot about sacred knowledge and indigeneity because we heard it from a wonderful source much better than I could ever do. And especially we want to hear it from the correct sources as she highlighted today. And so sacred knowledge, not everything should be shared. Not everything should be open. Not everything can be. And so we'll talk about, you know, how indigeneity through our participants through their own words today, how we learned more about this and we hope that it'll enrich your experiences too. Okay, so some of these vulnerabilities that we weren't aware of initially came out as the project progressed. And so, and by the time we were doing the interviews and going back and analyzing the data, there were quite a few of the vulnerabilities that came out. And we didn't, as we did our analysis, we didn't go through looking for Larson's six Rs. But we thought in terms of this presentation, it would be helpful to use those as an overlay because many of the themes that we found in, especially from our indigenous participants, they went right, slipped right in to the six Rs that we just heard about. And so I thought it would be interesting today to kind of, to share a taste of the experience of the indigenous participants that we interviewed in and how they expressed the need for respect, relationship, responsibility, reverence, relevance, reciprocity. And then they also expressed a desire for greater representation in OER and the desire to empower their students and a need for protection. So we don't have time to go through all of those today, but we'll go through some of the bolded themes. And again, like I said, our themes didn't have to start with our, but for this presentation we've merged these frameworks. So in terms of respect, this was from a subject who was not comfortable in creating their own OER on Creative Commons, but she did identify a space where she might feel safe posting content because she would feel it would be respected. I also would be comfortable in uploading my stuff on their an Australian University page just because I know there's a better understanding of us from the Pacific. With relationships, the quote that we pulled was, rather than talking about OER users and how we think of the relationship with the community and that relationality, this subject was talking about relationship, their own feeling of relationality to their own community and how by creating OER they might actually be betraying that relationship. I think one fear might be retaliation from other members within the community who might see stuff and say, what you said out there is not necessarily true. I don't like that. They are always gatekeepers for each other and in my culture, we have a lot of gatekeepers. I have professors that are way older than me. I respect their opinion and for our culture, it's always about relationship. Yeah, we try to maintain the relationship. Now, responsibility, we became aware of some real vulnerability based on past abuses of responsibility and people not handling their work responsibly. I had a person who visited Fiji for two weeks and he came back and he was all of a sudden an expert on Fiji and it's just ridiculous. He was talking to me as if he knew Fiji inside out and I'm like, okay, who are you talking to? Two weeks is not enough and how are you guys trading with this information? Another one, I was initially concerned about trying to contribute my information into that kind of creative common space because I really had issues with people utilizing my work. I want my own ideas and thoughts. I want them, the students, I want them to have exposure to Pacific Island culture and cultural productions. You have to be very careful though, especially with the idea of sort of remixing because you wanna make sure that it's staying culturally appropriate, that nobody's taking anything and using it, either appropriating it or sort of misrepresenting it and I think that that's something that's really a sensitive topic and something that needs to be approached in a responsible way. So for reciprocity, you'll hear in these quotes that not all of our subjects had the same opinions on all of these issues. They came from different backgrounds and ways of knowing. But I think these were really, really interesting. So I realized that this is someone who is hesitant to put her published resources as open educational resources. She understood the licensing and she knew, she understood the licensing but she still felt the need to give back. So I realized that it's still important to go in and put my stuff out there. Something in that space because something that I feel comfortable with giving because I'm taking and I'm using somebody else's intellectual property. So that was something that was really revealing to me. I depend on finding information and doing research in my class, in my study, whatever it is that I'm looking for and so I'm doing the thing that I was worried about. So by using OER, she felt like she needed to put, to share OER or she wasn't honoring the feeling of reciprocity. And then with empowering students, that was one of the non-6R themes that came out but related and I think what you see here is that, cause it's sort of contradictory. They've been saying, they were very wary, many of them were very wary about creating OER but they want their students to. So I think they've recognized that there's a spectrum of the sacred and the non-sacred that some things it would not be okay and would need protection but some things would be okay and that there's actually an empowering, an opportunity to empower indigenous students. She's, I also really like the idea of empowering them to create content and that was something I had never considered before the workshop and that was something that we could do and I'm so excited. Another one, be the one that's creating the resources if you don't see it there, say, oh well I can't find any indigenous authors on this particular topic. Well, then you are an indigenous author, you create it and license it and put it up and go for it. So as we continued, we left the workshop, we'd had a great discussion, at one point we were standing at the front being workshop presenters and at one point we just sat down. We just sat down and the discussion continued and we weren't sure leaving the workshop how this was going to go, we had planned to do continuing consultations and one thing that was great was that the discussion actually fueled what we were doing. People wanted to not just meet with us individually, they wanted to meet in communities or groups and to further discuss these things, they were important, they were charged with how do we do this, how can we empower our students but still create protection or they were engaged in the discussion and so these are not discussions to shy away from. In fact, these discussions became bore fruit. One group specifically wanted to get resources open educational resources for their students that had to do with Pacific Island Studies and so their project that they wanted to do was create a book that used essays and research that were specific to Pacific Island Studies and to make it open. So here are some suggestions based on our lessons learned and we're again so grateful and humbled by the generosity of our participants and their consent and sharing these things. We really wanted to center them since again we set out to do a study about faculty adoption and not like an indigenous study of, you know. And wow, how grateful we are that it developed into something more rich and that included all the perspectives. So really what I wanna kind of wrap up this presentation with today is how to sustainably share materials from diverse cultures and I was just tempted to put don't but of course that's not true. There are things that each person could do but please stop and ask yourself should it be shared? Who retains the right? And this is just a review of the much better job that was done earlier today. But who retains the right? Is it yours to share? Why are you sharing it? It's not to say that you can't have global examples. My students in my English 101 class who are 99% international and one from the continental US they're creating an English basics literature textbook from a global perspective and so it's really exciting to partner with them on that and I think that they do have the right to share examples that are relevant to them and students that will come after them. So there are ways to do it and here's the slide as promised that I was so inspired from the first all the keynote speakers were amazing and we can all agree upon but this seemed really applicable here from Darren give the gift of multiple perspectives, learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledge. We sat down not because we were defeated because we were like, let's do something different. This is way better. Let's talk about this and I feel like we had the spirit of that in the room and we're so again, so grateful for that. So as Maya Angelou says, do the best you can until you know better and then when you know better, do better. It's better to be engaged in the work in partnership, in conversation with multiple perspectives than to just say, well, there's no place for me to enter in at all and I think it's great when we're in collaboration especially if there's reciprocity, respect, reverence all the great things from the analogy today from the framework. Okay, future directions. We'll work on our qualitative data, revitalize our communities of practice, check in to see who is using or creating OER and who would benefit from more support and stay in conversation with the participants and open our circle. So here is a bitly on the top or if you prefer a QR code to our slides, I also have it in the SCAD for our presentation, I just uploaded it. Procrastination, neurodivergent, procrastinating, shocker. And there's our emails if you wanna get ahold of us and our LinkedIn, mine is very outdated but hers is fantastic, so you should look at hers. And we thank you so much. Thank you for being here. The questions are done. I think we're out, are we out of time? Okay, if you have questions, email us, we love you. Okay.