 Hello and welcome to Lightning Talk, Students of Co-Enquirers, Collaboration and Course Content Creation. My name is Alyssa White and I am a graduate student at the University of Lethbridge, located in the City of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. I am currently completing my MA in Anthropology and my thesis work centers on OERs, Open Pedagogy, and the inclusion of students as co-enquirers and collaborators in the design of course content. Today I will be sharing highlights of my research work over the past year. I'll be focusing today on three key points from my research, the power of student knowledge and the importance of student participation in course content creation, moving from consumers to collaborators and how students have become co-enquirers, moments of discomfort and mediating uncertainty around working openly, and finally I'll be providing some recommendations on including students as collaborators. First, I want to introduce to you the context in which my work began. The idea of creating an OER for my department as my thesis work actually began in the last year of my undergraduate degree. At the time I was surrounded by other undergrads in my department who were completing independent research on an array of amazing topics. However, many of the students expressed concerns that their research would eventually be forgotten as they moved on from the department and expressed a desire to have a way for it to matter beyond their own learning. It was this, the desire to diversify our educational resources, and my supervisor and mentors' emphasis on the importance of peer learning and making space for student holders of knowledge within her own pedagogy that inspired my own thesis work on creating an OER for introductory anthropology by collaborating with other students. Students have been critical to every step of the creation of the OER, from being its inspiration to being direct contributors through original content. When I talk about students as collaborators in course content creation, I am talking about three different levels of involvement. First, one-on-one collaboration in which I worked with students to create original work centered on their individual research. Second, through the use of in-class assignments in which we designed non-disclosable assignments that will expand the OER. And third, in the form of direct student feedback, this was important to give students space to let me know what was working for them and what wasn't in terms of the use of the OER and how it could be improved in the future. Here I am, pictured with an important student collaborator and now a dear friend, Felicia Roche, who worked with me to create a chapter for the OER on black anthropologists. Her work is now being used to discuss the ideas of erasure, citational politics and how who we read and teach about in our courses can be used to reproduce colonial structures and the role of power in forming disciplinary canons with our intro students. This blurry Zoom picture is a great embodiment of both what completing research during a pandemic can look like and the importance of what she described as working outside of contained spaces, working outside of the classroom, working outside the constraints of a printed resource that must be reproduced every time it is updated and working outside of post-secondary institutions themselves by opening up the dissemination of our knowledge through OERs. Opening the boundaries of how and where academic knowledge exists is especially important to my work because it opens up and diversifies the types of voices contributing to it. Students are also collaborating course content creation through the use of non-disposable assignments which are assignments designed to extend beyond the students' own learning and shift them from a place of knowledge consumer to knowledge producer. On the left is one of the questions from a short survey I conducted during the beginning of my MA work where I asked intro students how they would feel about reading content generated by their peers. As you can see, most students either agree to be neutral about the idea of their peers taking on the role of educators with only three students overall disagreeing. At this point in my work, I have employed four different NDAs with students. The Cretan Assignment in which students are asked to design a fieldwork assignment for future students including proposing research topics, methodologies and forms of dissemination for research findings outside of the typical paper. The Explain a Concept Assignment in which students were asked to write a short entry describing an anthropological concept and how it could be illustrated through an example from their everyday life. These entries will be used to teach future intro students these concepts. The Learning Objective Summary in which students were asked to review a portion of their assigned readings from the OER and create a short learning objective summary for future students including key concepts and figures and challenging ideas to review. And finally, the Find an Anthropologist Assignment. The point of this assignment was to further diversify the OER by having students take on the role of the researcher and finding an anthropologist who has not mentioned the OER. Students were then asked to write a short biography about them with the goal of diversifying representation in race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality and research specialty while also having students think about these ideas of citational politics and representation in our educational texts. I also cannot forget the students who have contributed to the development of the OER in other ways besides course content creation. Some of the most important conversations during my research have been with students within the intro courses who have provided feedback on using the OER as a class text. Their ideas around accessibility, representation and learning support have been essential to making the OER what it is today. Pictured here is a word cloud generated by the intro students when asked what accessibility and their educational resources means to them. Their knowledge has been just as critical in expanding my understanding of accessibility in both resources and pedagogy as direct contributors and have also been essential in changing pedagogical approaches for both myself and faculty in the department. While my experiences collaborating with students have been primarily positive, I must also address what I have come to term moments of discomfort in my research. This discomfort can happen in multiple ways for both the student and the educator. For students, the role of the knowledge producer is often new and may be a bit daunting. Many students who participated in my NDAs initially only wanted to know what they needed to do to get the A. Support and the encouragement of curiosity is critical as students navigate this new position. This also means leaving room for trying new things and making what many students will consider mistakes. I always try to reframe these as learning opportunities and places of growth as students' experiences transition. Students may also experience discomfort or anxiety about their work being viewed by others. Deconstructing this anxiety is critical for student comfort during this time period and allowing students to opt out of working openly should they choose so also provides students agency over their role as knowledge producer. For educators, students will sometimes produce work that deals with difficult or challenging content. They may also have feedback on the handling of content within course resources and not all of it will be positive. Creating space for these conversations where students can express their own discomfort and provide suggestions for the future is essential. The importance of scaffolding and providing feedback on student work for future improvement is also a very important part of this process. As you step away from the stage on the stage to be the guide on the side, students will be looking to you for mentoring and it's important that you provide that for them. Finally, creating space to discuss choices in course design is a great way to both model openness and help students understand why we teach the way we do. Curriculum and pedagogy is often a mystery to students. Creating dialogue around these choices helps them both understand you as an educator and their position as knowledge producers themselves. Finally, here are some recommendations based on my own research on how to incorporate students' collaborators in course content creation. First, start small. Completely overhauling courses to incorporate students' collaborators is time consuming and can be challenging depending on the resources at your disposal. Create smaller realistic goals to make this achievable on a timeline that works for you. Second, scaffold assignments and provide constructive feedback to guide students as they take on the role of knowledge producer. This encourages richer, more authentic work, allows students to grow as learners and knowledge producers and helps with their anxiety over new assignment formats. Third, be communicative and clear. Many of these ideas are new to students. Being clear about the reasoning behind these assignments and communicating expectations around them effectively will better support them. Fourth, model openness. It is unfair to ask students to work openly if we as educators refuse to do the same. Fifth, create space for challenging conversations, feedback, and for as many voices as possible in your classrooms. Sixth, be flexible. There are often hiccups and challenges that occur, and content may have to be redesigned to better support student success. This is all part of that learning process. Seventh, be brave. This is not easy work. It is often very intensive and requires far more labor than traditional course content, but your students will be so much better for it. And finally, be curious. This is just as much of a learning process for us as educators as it is often for students. Remaining open to further learning encourages students to do the same. Thank you to all of you who have attended today. If you have questions, I can be reached at the following contact information displayed on the screen.