 Well, hello everyone and thank you for joining us. Good afternoon or good evening for some of you. My name is Liz Yada. I work for the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, part of Open Education Global. I'm so glad you could all join us today. If you haven't already, feel free to introduce yourself in the chat and use the chat to ask any questions when the presentation gets going. Next slide, Laura. And if you're not familiar with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, we're a community practice and we've got community college members across the US and Canada. We have 101 members, although that represents a lot more colleges than just 101. For example, we have the Community College, the Chancellor's Office in California, and they have 116 campuses. And so if you want to learn more, visit our website or look at the Become a Member page. And with that, I'll turn it over to Laura. Hi everybody. Thanks for being here today. Our agenda for today is as follows. We're already a few minutes into our warm welcome to you all. Over the next few minutes, James and I will be going over exactly what OFAR is, our program overview. And then Gayatri Manakandan, one of our beloved coaches, will be taking a deep dive into what is anti-racist pedagogy in the classroom based on her experience as both a practitioner and now a coach for OFAR. And then we will look over some current research and what next steps are. And then we will conclude this afternoon, this evening, or this morning, wherever you are, this panel discussion with the Q&A, the lightning round. So who we are, I'm Laura Dunn, the co-director for Open for Anti-Racism. I'm also the director of assessment and writing programs at Santa Clara University. James is my co-director at Open for Anti-Racism. He's also the dean of educational technology, learning resources, and distance learning at College of the Canyons. Gayatri Manakandan is, as I mentioned earlier, one of our beloved OFAR coaches and a previous OFAR participant. She's a professor of math, a math instructional specialist, and a student success center and professional develop liaison at Compton College. So what we hope you'll walk away with today is a framework for defining anti-racist pedagogy, as well as a better understanding of how open education can support anti-racist pedagogy. We'll also go over some key outcomes for the OFAR program. And let me say a few brief words about the origins of the Open for Anti-Racism program, or OFAR. The OFAR program began in the spring and summer of 2020. For those of you familiar with the United States context, you'll recall the horrific murder of George Floyd along with many other African-Americans. And just another in the long lines of abuses. But the attention that that murder and other murders garnered and the kinds of conversations that were sparked by those tragic events sparked a reflection in many parts of U.S. higher education on what higher education could do to counter-racism or become anti-racist. And what we found, we myself and my then co-director and co-conspirator Una Daley recently retired, we reflected that or what we were hearing from faculty colleagues in our setting in the California Community Colleges was that faculty would like to do something, would like to do more to make their teaching anti-racist to figure out how they could respond to the reflections that they were going through or what they were learning. But despite many, many, many statements by institutions that they were going to make themselves anti-racist somehow by putting a statement in their strategic plan or putting a statement on their website, not a lot of practical support was forthcoming. So Una and I from our positions deeply embedded in the open education movement believe that open education, open pedagogy, open educational resources could provide tools to help faculty make their teaching anti-racist. We approached the Hewlett Foundation, the amazing, thoughtful, supportive program officer for OER there, Angela DeBarger, helped us craft and further develop, refine our idea. And out of that, OFAR was born. You see our premises here on the slide that faculty want to make their teaching anti-racist but they need information tools and a safe place to learn. And secondly, that open education can offer tools to help faculty make their teaching and their materials anti-racist. And one more preparatory word about our context. The context for OFAR at present is the California Community Colleges. That's where Una and I have done most of our work. California Community Colleges are open access institutions. We proudly accept the top 100% of applicants to our colleges and we are the largest system of higher education in the world. 116 colleges serving 2 million students. And with that context, I'm going to pass it back to you, Laura. Thanks, James. So the OFAR program every year puts out a call for participation throughout the California Community College system. And so this year, we have 7 schools and James, you can jump in and correct me if I'm getting the numbers wrong. And 44 participants across those schools who are enrolled in this program led by our amazing team of coaches. So in the program, participants explore how to use OER and open pedagogy to make instructional materials and teaching more anti-racist. And there are pillars for doing this, such as learning about anti-racist pedagogy, OER and open pedagogy in a facilitated online course on canvas. And then participants who are faculty members develop and implement an action plan for their courses. So this all starts in the fall. The course, the facilitated online courses in the fall and then in the spring, they implement their action plans in collaboration with their students. Throughout the year, our participants benefit from peer connections. We host monthly webinars with influential speakers. We offer coaching and administrative support. At the end of the year, participants document the impact of OFAR through surveys and interviews and record student outcomes as well. So before we get into the deep dive with Gayatri, we'll look a little bit at what it means to do or what is anti-racist pedagogy. And of course, anti-racism is a dynamic field. It's always changing. But first, we understand that we need to be race conscious, acknowledging our identity and social position and recognizing that implicit bias exists. We think systematically and structurally to expose systemic and structural racism. We also examine the history of a particular discipline as how knowledge is defined and accepted, as well as asking who gets to have a voice in the discipline. We include voices and perspectives from many people and groups. And we also invite students to contribute their own perspectives and experiences. So with that, I will hand it over to Gayatri to talk about her experience and knowledge in OFAR. Thank you, Lara. Hi everyone. So I first came to know about this program and then as a college, we applied for this program. So our college was luckily chosen and then we get to participate in the 2020-2023 cohort. And literally allowed doing this work and then I have an opportunity to coach this year. So with that, I want to share a little bit about what I did through my participation and what work I'm doing in my class. Can we go to the next slide, please? So the first thing is when before I started this program, I was using OER because our students really go through a lot of financial burdens. The textbooks are really expensive. So I said, okay, we have a lot of open educational resources available. Also, I decided to make all my classes create my course structure based on this openly available textbooks. And then when I started this program, I get to learn about open pedagogy and anti-racist pedagogy. So slowly, in the beginning, I thought, I'm teaching math. How am I going to make this anti-racist? Or why is that related in my class? That's the feeling I had. But after going through this class, I understand how I could incorporate these techniques into my class. So the subject, the statistics I chose that we offer many sections of elementary statistics course in our college. So I decided to use these practices to apply in the elementary statistics course. So next step is building the course, right? How do we bring these strategies into the statistics course? So my wonderful coach shared with me that there are already a lot of tools available that are created. So I came to know about this course created to go with this openly available statistics book on open stacks. So here are some example topics that are created in that course. Can you go to the next slide, please? So this is the course. So this course is created and it's available in comments for everybody to choose. So this is called statistics for social justice. This course completely matched my textbook. That's an open stacks textbook. And for each chapter, there was a topic related to the like social justice topic related to what we were learning. So this made it super easy for me to incorporate adopt. So that way I was able to easily bring in the concepts and that goes along well with the textbook that I was using. So the creation part becomes super easy. So I was able to integrate it and talk about a lot of these topics in the class. So the first time I was a little bit like kind of seeing, oh, do I make how much time do the students spend in the class on dealing with this or discussing with these topics besides statistics. Those are a few questions that I always have to deal with, especially the first semester that I was trying to put in this in my class. So I made this some of these are optional. So we discuss and we say whoever interested, you can participate. So we making this like optional. I felt later it was not a best strategy, rather, I would make it mandatory but giving them like a following a pattern like every week we just have a discussion on these topics. And since it's already integrated with the statistics book, it's totally it has a good flow. So those are some of the things that I learned that we have to have a pattern it needs to be mandatory. And also before introducing this just to make the students ease into these topics because some of these deal with police shootings, and we just want to make sure the students are comfortable in participating in these. So just walking them through or scaffolding these activities was really helpful in making the students understand why we are doing in the statistics class and why the topics are like, you know, a number of people in prison or. But we just talk about the variety of topics in the scores and bringing in them and an income those kind of stuff there is a lot of topics that relates and go well. So I just want to share this one with this because sometimes when before we start we feel that, you know, it's overwhelming like you know there is so much to do how much am I going to do right. There are a lot of stuff that are openly available that we can take it and easily incorporate to whatever we are doing like small little step that really makes a big change. So that bringing on all your that's openly open educational resources and having it with a anti raises pedagogy. I want to bring in the open pedagogy as well. Their students kind of create the things that we teach. So can we go to the next slide. So I want to share this one activity. We can take this activity and do it in many different levels. So I'm just going to share one example there the students kind of co create the weekend in the beginning of the semester we can use this by creating a community form or at the end of the semester we can create the same activity as a wall of wisdom. So let me go through. I want to increase students belonging in the class. I want them to co create work with my syllabus building the community norms, etc. So at college we think, oh, a college student should be behaving in certain way that the teacher kind of magically imagines they already know, but a lot of these norms are more is different with different cultures so we just want to share differently what we expect what are the things allowed, what are the things not allowed. So, in the beginning of the semester, using canvas wiki pages. So I created. It's very very simple created this simple topic, how I can help the students in the class, and what will they do as a student to do well in the class. So it's a canvas wiki page where students can edit and enter whatever they want. I just kind of warn them not to delete other students post and also they can put their name at the end, because I do count all the participation as like one point something like that. So I want to know which students participate by track them by seeing who did the post who participated because my students don't do it so I kind of make it optional mandatory so I can track. So this is and co create the norms, the same idea can be applied for co creating the syllabus as well. Also, at the end of the semester they will be sharing some tips, some strategies that they use to be successful in this course, I call that as a wall of wisdom. So they shared it, I let them know that whatever strategies and tips they shared in the class, I will share that page with my next set of students. So they will get an idea from my previous class, what are the strategies and tips they used. So this is one activity we do together in the class and it really works well with all type of modalities, either online, hybrid and in person, it works really well. And students feel connected more because they have some freedom to do things together. So they are wise as being heard. So they feel more connection and they take their responsibility to maintain whatever the norms that we create as a class. Can we go to the next slide please. So another important thing I learned is providing the space for students for their reflection. So when I did these activities for every every month we do a reflection, meaning what they got out of it, what they benefited, what are the confusions that they have so and we provide each other as an instructor, it gave me how I could treat the class. So that way, they all understand and learn better. So usually, when we have student feedback at the end of the semester that's too late for an instructor to make any changes for the current class because they will be finishing that semester. So having this intermediate reflections there they can share helps the instructor and also helps the student because we can have the class more fluid. It's like, changeable, like you know, we can adjust things here and there. So we can immediately get what didn't work, what confusions they have, so that way we can tweak this stuff. So providing this time for reflection that really kind of helps the teacher and the students. And I did notice that the students participate more on these kind of assignment. And even sometimes if the student didn't finish the homework, but they are willing to share that, oh, something happened to this time and I couldn't do the homework. I'm doing small little changes like providing late passes in the class, accommodating students like, you know, so those those kind of thing really, really work well for the students that they're learning. And another thing I noticed is students are open to share because they're not quite they're not like, you know, not participating. I saw that there is like increased in the participation and also they felt the belonging they like working with each other. They kind of helped each other on the discussion board with a mathematical questions, whatever they post the other students will go. Oh, this is how I solved it before these kind of practices. Students, if you have a question posted on the discussion board, like nobody would like to, you know, eagerly. And share their questions, even though we talk about this growth mindset, it's okay to make mistake all those stuff, but these kind of I do notice that many students kind of there is a sense of belonging and a good community to help each other and learn. With math, I feel many students have a fear of math like anxiety with this open discussion that kind of help them ease into math and ease into like the college setting. So I would say now I'm a coach, I would say I could share these with my my team, and also I'm really impressed with all these ideas my team members bring in it's a constant learning right so we just make changes and make improvements that whatever we do. I do want to tell you the webinars that we attended during our course, it was super helpful there the previous participant kind of shared with their creations, and it encouraged us because in the beginning I didn't know where to start. And then I attended these webinars got a lot of ideas, and then I was able to tweak it, however, I was how much our eye was comfortable in making changes at that time, because we can't make the whole big flip over change thing so it just needs to be like step by step. So that we can adjust the flow and manage the, manage the concepts that we are teaching along with these. So I just want to share with you all, even one small thing that you can change that will bring a big impact to your students learning and so I just want to share that with you all. And back to Laura. Thank you so much Gayatri. That was great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I'm going to, I'm going to talk a little bit about the, the research prop program that we have around over but I just want to say actually how much I, I really love your expansive application of open pedagogy and understanding open education as much more than just a textbook right. And it reminds me of the saying by Robin Dorosa many years ago that she doesn't want to be a part of a movement that is focused on making a static textbook free. Right. That, you know, that's not really progress. You know, we can say the same thing about a textbook filled with white supremacy and misogyny, just making that free is not really progress or it's not the progress that I want to make so I really love your, your welcoming approach. And understanding that as part of open education. So as back back to the program here. We are now in year four of our of the offer program. And each year we do a lot of research around the program to determine how it's going and what changes are actually happening in the classroom and how we can improve the program so we've got a complete research. We have complete research results for the first 3 years we see on the next few slides we're going to see some highlights of those research results. So first of all, on this slide you see that 100% of our participants in year 3 indicated that they were using anti racist and culturally responsive pedagogy. As exemplified by by guide trees examples, 88, 88 and a half percent of our participants called out open pedagogy specifically, and 88% of our participants in year one told us that they were using. And we only have that from year one because we dropped that from the from the survey we again, you know, wanted to focus on more than just a free textbook and think more about helping our participants engage in open pedagogy as as a step towards anti racist pedagogy. Next slide please. This is the research result that really warms up my heart. We introduced this question first in year three, we asked our participants beef at the outset of the program, as well as at the end of the program so the classic pre test and pre survey and post survey. Whether they felt confident discussing racist racism and anti racism with their students prior to the program, 28% of the participants indicated that they were confident in doing so. And after the program, 88 and a half percent of participants indicated that they were confident or very confident in discussing racism and anti racism with their students. So that really warms my heart because that confidence that self confidence that self efficacy is something that I think probably remains more than just using a free textbook. Thank you. Next slide please. We also survey administrators from the participating colleges so Gayatri mentioned that her college Compton College was selected so we accept applications from teams of participants at a college. We focus on teams for a number of reasons, including we want the participants to have a bit of a support network within the institution, but we also hope to have an impact on the institution. So we ask the applicant teams to provide a letter from a sponsoring administrator a vice president or a dean, for example. And we ask the lead of our participating team to check in with the administrator every once in a while let them know what the team is doing how's it going and how can you be of help. So when we survey the administrators. At the end of the program, 87% of the respondents said that they felt very engaged in the offer work. And 100% said they provided support to the team in one way or another, either giving professional development credit or helping helping lift up the teams by by having them speak to the board, the governing board of the institution or having them speak at a at an all college meeting. There are lots of great ways that our administrators supported that supported the teams next slide please. And we also survey the students in the classes in which our participants are making a change. Again, during the fall semester our participants learn they're participating that canvas course and then in the spring they're implementing a concrete change in their classes. We surveyed the students in those classes, the survey the students tell us that 80 in 88% of the students told us that they examined the history of their discipline. Going back to that question of how knowledge is created whose voice is left out of the disciplinary body of knowledge, 88 and a half percent tell us that they always felt treated the same as other students in the class. And 82% told us that their thoughts and ideas are always valued the same as other students in that class so those are indications going back to what Gayatri mentioned about her class indications that students felt included, not only engaged, but also included and reflected in the classes. Next slide please. Well, and here is our moment of discussion. Laura, I'm going to kick in this back to you. Sure. I think I'm actually just kicking it back to everybody to see if anybody has any questions for Gayatri James or myself about afar and anti racism and anti racist pedagogy. And how this could be applicable to your work and you know recognizing that many of you are from different contexts, then we're working in. How does this resonate in your context. So a nice reminder in the chat from L of course that open is more than textbooks and just as libraries are more than the firewalls. Absolutely. So, comments, thoughts, let me see if Trav is still with us. Trav one of our previous participants I know he couldn't stay long he darn it he had to leave. I wanted to get a word or two from Trav. So, comments, questions from the group here how how is. How was the fall of spring of 2021 handled at your institutions as far as your college governing board or your senior administrators releasing press releases saying tomorrow, the institution will be anti racist. Was there any actual support for your, for your, your efforts or was it just what I said it was, did you, was there any concrete support forthcoming for those efforts on the part of the faculty or staff. If you know, I want to share that then we applied it's always the team was so good because we had a team of faculty in from different disciplines. And we were holding round table discussions and other faculty who are not part of both or were able to join we had a good support from our administration so we were able to hold these. And, and we did a lot of showcase for them we shared what we did with our other faculty from our college it was well received. I think, doing these work alone can be very, very hard. And sometimes it may be depressing. But having the team, it really helps because you feel I'm not the only one. If you feel you are kind of the odd one out, then we start questioning ourselves, am I doing the right thing kind of stuff. So, we had like a few math faculty members working together on creating different activities. And then we share with each other it's like, I've been a student take a class from mine to another instructor they don't feel this instructor was super welcoming and other instructor was not we create a culture in the campus, so that we accommodate everybody. The voices are being heard so it's not just a one person moment is just creating a culture in your campus so. Guy, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Again, we're, we're in year five or cohort, I'm sorry, cohort four of old far. During the first year, we accepted applications from individuals. So we had many individuals from many, many colleges, but they were on their own, and we realized as you said that can be very isolating or difficult work. And in the first year, in fact, two of our participants brought to their attention brought brought to our attention. Let's say the pushback or resistance that they were experiencing from students. One one participant told us outright that they had white supremacist students in their class. Another participant told us that because of the discipline they were teaching which is part of a multi level series, some students thought that they would were disadvantaged by not focusing on the essential elements that were of knowledge that we're going to be applied to that entire series that say, for example, you know math 123 or biology 123 those those types of sequences, and then another participant, in fact told us that they had received threats from the community on social media, because they had publicly posted that they were participating in this program, and so on and so forth and that they got, you know, really horrible response on social media. So, in subsequent years we saw applications from a smaller number of colleges but with more people so they really that support network. We also began asking the sponsoring administrators. What supports do you have in place for your participant for your colleagues if they receive pushback, so that the individual is not on their own just hanging out there we want the institution to say oh yeah we have this process or procedure with human resources or with with campus safety or something to help support our participants if if you know really negative things happen. You have a comment here in the chat from L. She says that our campus focused on the intersectionality of racial access and disability justice, nothing about us without us was the theme of our road show that extended into these ideas into material. Thank you so much, Al. And thank you, Al. Thank you, Al, for the reminder, or the importance of intersectionality and disability justice, absolutely positively. I see a hand up from from Madeleine. Yes, I've been to several of these programs, and I was so I said, oh wow we should be doing this at our campus. Right. And every time I try to start. It's hard to kind of move it forward. But as I'm listening to this now. We're part of the city University of New York, another big institution and I realized, no this is not about just. This is about all of CUNY kind of banding together as well as even SUNY. We, we benefit both CUNY and SUNY from receiving funding for OER. So it we have a vehicle we have the money to do it we just have to collectively get together to do it. And like I said, every time I come to these type of sessions I'm like, this is what we should be doing. And like you mentioned James, what was happening on our campus. Yes, everyone reacted to what what happened to George Floyd, you know, and all these statements went out, but what did we change. Exactly. And that release is going to change the world right. Yeah, that was, you know, it's like, and yeah we'll have we'll have town halls, because that'll fix the problem. But it wasn't addressing the problem and I think within the classroom I think that's really that's where you can start addressing the problem. And, and, and I had a question for it. And forgive me if I say your name incorrectly. I hope I said that. Okay, I'm sorry. I was wondering for your students I wrote that this question. Were they able to link what they were doing in your class with some of the other classes they were taken. Crossed I see that it crosses over so I was just wondering. So, but that's a great question. I never asked the students how it kind of related with other courses they are taking. All my feedback questions are based on my class. So we did these stuff, and then I asked, okay, how, how, how you are doing with this class but it's a great thing I never thought. You know, there is a lot of like connections right they will see this in different classes like say, even ethnic studies or any other different classes that we they take that is a lot of overlap, but I never thought of this. This question is asking my students how it kind of applies in their other classes. But now I, I know the next day my students I can open that question to them and then understand how it relates how they feel how comfortable they are with other classes also because it's all multi layered it just all the concepts that go into their head that come up as a pro like you know they just their mindset, how they behave how they treat how they're, it just like a lot of metacognitive reflections that I had with all these kind of topics exposed in it but yeah that's a good one for me to keep it and ask for my this set of students so I would know how I'm really now thinking how they will feel and I'm curious to know as well. Okay, thank you. I was just, I was just curious, I was just curious, you know, thank you. Thank you for bringing that up because I owe my feedback was only about my class so that's that's a good one yeah. Okay, Laura I think back to you. We're looking at the clock here slowly. One more comment here in the chat from Jonathan, who says that Gayatri's presentation is really inspiring for a fellow mathematician. Hey Jonathan. We often hear it's impossible to do anti racist teaching in such abstract subjects. So I'd love to hear examples of how that's not true at all. So true. Okay, so we are at 312 so we will move on here. So right now, we are underway the middle of year or the spring semester of afar year for we encourage everyone to get involved if possible. To offer year five, we accept college team applications. If you're accepted we provide institutional support. Look at student outcomes and student leadership. There's a QR code here for you to get on the list for our next call for participants. Go ahead and take a screenshot of that. You can go ahead and also take a screenshot of these resources here to learn more about open for anti racism. Our website is listed above. WWW CCC OER.org slash afar. You can also read an impact story about afar here. I'm not going to read that out for you. You can just take a screenshot. Liz, Liz kindly put the put the link in the chat. Thank you. Number of links in the chat there. Great. Awesome. And with that, I will hand it over to Liz to give us some of important closing information. Thanks Lauren. So just quickly, if you want to stay in touch with the community college consortium for open educational resources, we have our community email, which is a Google group that's been going on for more than 10 years. Lots of really wonderful OER practitioners on that list. We also keep a running list of. Conferences coming up that are involved with open education and so if you go to a website. And go under the get involved menu. There's a spreadsheet. And we also have other things like EDI blog posts and student OER impact stories on there. Next slide. And so this is the end of open education week, but next month we are going to have a webinar on AI and OER, which is obviously a big topic. I think I personally went to 2 different sessions this week on that. I know there were more and then in May we're going to be exploring open education publishing platforms. And then just we want to know what you thought. This feedback survey is for all of CCC OER's. I'll put the link in the chat webinars this week. So let us know what you thought and. I think just what's left is the same. Thank you very much for attending. Thanks James for putting the spring webinars in there and we will see you online later. Thanks everyone. Yeah, and thank you Liz and thank you to CCC OER and all the CCC OER members and if you're not a member become a member. You're not on the email list. Get on that email list.