 All right, yes, so it's my great pleasure today to introduce Camille Gentles-Peart. Dr. Camille Gentles-Peart is a professor of communication studies at Roger Williams University. Her areas of expertise include Black feminism, critical race studies, and Caribbean postcolonial studies. Her current research agenda looks at the ways in which anti-Black racism is perpetuated through discourses and practices around Black women's bodies and the embodied wellness strategies Black women use to disrupt racist and colonialist ideas. She has written and edited several books including romance with voluptuousness, Caribbean women, and thick bodies in the U.S. Her work has also appeared in academic journals such as Women's Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Feminism and Psychology. Dr. Gentles-Peart is committed to creating spaces in the wider community that amplify and uplift African-descended women and girls. She co-founded the Collaborative for the Research on Black Women and Girls, which creates restorative and healing spaces for Black women and girls globally. She's also a faculty fellow with the New England Board of Higher Education, where she co-created and directs the North Star Collective to promote reparative justice and uplift BIPOC faculty. Welcome, Camille. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Susan, and thank you to the board of Open Education Conference for having me. I am feeling a whole lot of things. I'm excited. I am honored. I'm humbled to be closing out what has been a very inspiring and energizing conference, and so I want to start by way of introduction by saying that I am a Black woman. I'm living in the United States, but I am originally from Jamaica, the so-called Third World, and I am raising a little, well, not little anymore, a 12-year-old Black girl who is smart and wonderful and in every way, and also 12. I'm married to and I have a partner who is a Black man living in the United States, and so racism, there hasn't been a day in the United States really. There hasn't been a day really since I've been born that racism hasn't shaped my experiences, whether it's in Jamaica or in the United States. It just looks a little bit different depending on where you are, and so I am invested in racial justice. I'm invested in racial justice overall, and I'm specifically invested in racial justice in higher education. I am committed to fostering equitable environments for Black people, for Brown people, and for other people of color who are in the academy. I am committed to creating spaces that affirm the identities and experiences of those who have been made invisible in society because of their race. I am committed to curating and creating and curating spaces that cultivate the capacity of racially dominant people to be self-reflexive of their own racial positionalities, and I also deeply believe that the mission of higher education is not only to disseminate the material, but is to equip and inspire students to question and transform racial hierarchies. It's to cultivate their potential to be agents of racial justice, and I also believe that open education has a real opportunity to support this work for racial justice. It's commitment to separating knowledge and information from capitalist structures and its desire to pull students into the creative processes of teaching and learning. Those provide very fertile ground for dismantling racial oppressions in higher education. However, to be effective as a tool for racial justice, I also believe that open education movements and practitioners need to do some introspection, need to do some self-reflection and make some changes. Open education is not automatically anti-racist, right? Like being open doesn't automatically mean you're anti-racist. It needs to be intentional, and so I'm going to spend our time together just sharing with you some food for thought, some reflective questions to help us better mobilize open education in our own areas in pursuit of racial justice. And what I'm going to share here is not new at all. I'm standing on the shoulders of many forerunners, some of whom are my ancestors, and I think that what I am saying also punctuates some of what we have heard throughout the conference. So, how can open education be effectively mobilized for racial justice? I have four points to make. First, open education needs to be practiced with an understanding of racial power and education violence. Jalil Mustafa coined the term education violence, and by that he refers to the harm done to marginalized people, particularly black people, through educational systems. And not only harm at an interpersonal level, but also the structural harm, the systemic harm, institutionalized harm, cultural harm, harm through the curriculum. And these kinds of harms are not some unfortunate side effects of an otherwise functioning good educational system. Formal education systems were never meant to hold, never meant to teach, never meant to employ people of color. They are white supremacists in their intent. For instance, institutions of higher education uphold white supremacy by explicitly excluding the voices and knowledges and experiences of black people and indigenous people and other people of color. They sanitize and whitewash the history of disciplines and they diminish the studies of non-white people. And beyond the curricular aspects of it, we can now confirm, many of us knew this, but it's now more publicly known, that the transatlantic slave systems and secular colonialism were central to the founding and financing of many colleges and universities in the United States. So the bodies of black and indigenous people were the original endowments that made many institutions of higher education possible. And post-secondary institutions are accountable for the continued occupation of indigenous lands, for supporting gentrification, or the so-called neighborhood revitalizations of black neighborhoods and those of other marginalized communities. And these institutions of higher education in the United States, they practice racially discriminatory hiring from administrators, the faculty, the staff, and they foster racist tenure and promotion policies. They also institute policing practices and they support policing practices that profile black people and brown people and indigenous people as well, whether they're residents or are on campus. And so why am I saying this? Why is it significant? What is the significance of foregrounding the historical and continued racial oppression perpetuated in higher education? Well, it is to encourage us to put open education in context. For open education to be effective in fostering racial justice, it cannot be conceptualized and practiced in a vacuum. It has to be a part of a larger movement for institutional transformation and ideological shifts in education. It has to be developed alongside these movements that want to expose and end education violence. Ideally, open education must be embedded in critical race inquiry in these frameworks that expose and oppose and redress forms of oppression and inequality and injustice. So I'm thinking, for example, of black feminist thoughts, or black intellectual thoughts, or indigenous studies, or critical cultural studies. For example, when open education is grounded in racial justice frameworks such as these, it helps us to reframe the purpose of open education. It helps us to see open education as a tool, not the destination. It helps us to see open education as an entry point into the fight for racial justice in education, but not the endpoint. In fact, open education really isn't the point. When open education is connected to racial justice frameworks, what we end up with is a blueprint, a vision that will be sustained beyond programs. And one of the things that I heard coming up throughout this week is, how do we sustain open education movements on campuses after student leaders leave or after an administrator who has been an ally leaves? And I think that this is one of the ways to do it, is to connect it to and ground it in a ground open education in the desire for racial equity on our campuses. When open education is connected to racial justice frameworks, it also allows us to keep in sight the full reality of what we're dealing with, to acknowledge the breadth and the depth of racial injustices, and equally important, it forces us to acknowledge that open education alone cannot dismantle education violence. One area, one discipline, one singular theory cannot claim the ability to dismantle white supremacy. Open education has to be seen as one tool in the struggle for racial liberation in higher education. In addition, when open education is connected to racial justice movements and racial justice frameworks, the ultimate goal will not be to only change traditional ways of teaching for the sake of it or to promote unrestricted access to content or to boost student engagement. That will not be the end point. When it's connected to racial justice framework, open education would even go beyond the pursuit of student success. We would practice open education as a means to promote the sovereignty and the liberation of black people and indigenous people and other people of color in the academy, in an academy that was not built for them. And so as I was preparing for this, I saw a recent edition of Inside Higher Ed Newsletter that reported on a study that reveals that introductory courses in STEM push racially marginalized students out of STEM fields. So even though black and Latinx and indigenous students make up about 34% of STEM-leaning incoming college students, they only account for 18% of STEM degree recipients. And that's statistic is even worse when we break it down by gender. So even when students of color have access to colleges and courses and course materials and content, they are still being marginalized. Racial justice imperatives force us to think beyond access to free content, to think beyond being able to remix and remake content. Open education mobilize in pursuit of racial justice in education will be connected to a sustained effort to end racially motivated education violence. Overall, open education then needs to be grounded and contextualized in racial justice frameworks and movements. And this would mean that the professional development around open education would be framed within the realities of education violence. As we develop workshops to engage faculty in open education resources or in renewable assignments and open pedagogy, these should be accompanied by professional development around education violence as well. So that's my first point. My second point is that to be effectively mobilized for racial justice, open education has to be driven by reparative justice. Now the most common response of educational institutions in the United States to education violence has been to take off diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, right? Or for short, DEI efforts. But quite frankly, DEI frameworks, the way that they often work on our campuses, they often fail at achieving equity. They do not promote the work necessary to transform institutions into spaces that can serve and nurture and uplift Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. This is because the most common approaches to DEI generally foreground helping white people engage with people of different races. And it often ends up privileging the preferences and outcomes of white people overall, while neglecting the actual needs of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color in the institution. And so by recentering white people, DEI work, at least the conventional DEI work, ends up recreating and perpetuating the invisibility of Black people and Indigenous people and other people of color. So of course, this work to unlearn these ideas is necessary for racial justice, right? There's this kind of work that needs to be done within white communities, of course, but it is not the only work. And so my colleague, Tatiana Cruz, and I suggest a reparative justice framework to education violence. Reparative justice is premised on the idea of reparations or making amends to the people who have been harmed by slavery, by settler colonialism, or just the broader impacts of white supremacy and structural racism. Unfortunately, reparations is often interpreted in economic terms, right? Interpreted as the writing of a check. And that is a very limited interpretation of reparations. So reparations movements in the United States and really around the world, such as those from movement for Black lives and the reparations project and land back, they conceptualize reparations in more complicated ways, right? Like they conceptualize it around processes of redress and healing and remedying, around restitution and repatriation of things lost and stolen, around the repair of damages done in the past to Black and Indigenous people. So stopping current harm that's going on right now and preventing the reproduction of harm. And so reparative justice leans heavily into these articulations of reparations. It involves confronting harm, acknowledging and believing, that's important, believing the trauma of Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. It, and it actively seeks to make amends for those damages. It centers uplifting and restoring Black people and Indigenous people. And this means then that reparative justice is explicitly driven by the experiences of the marginalized groups, not the dominantly positioned groups. And it prioritizes their healing or healing. It prioritizes their mental health and their sovereignty and their restoration. And so some key questions that reparative justice asks are how have Black and Indigenous people and other people of color been harmed? How do Black people and Indigenous people continue to be harmed? What trauma are they facing or living with? And what needs to be done in order to secure their repair and their healing? So to be mobilized for racial justice, open education practices should be grounded in this framework of reparative justice. It should begin with the needs and experiences of the systematically oppressed. And so if we reframe those key questions in the context of open education, we would be asking then how have Black and Indigenous people and other people of color been harmed in our institutions? How do Black and Indigenous people continue to be harmed in our classrooms, in our curriculum, by our administration? What trauma are they facing or living with because of our teaching practices? What do they need from us for their repair and for their healing? And what would that look like? You know, what would it look like for open education to be reparative? Well, first, I think that this would mean giving up open education's emphasis on equality. Say, what? Yes, giving up relinquishing open education's emphasis on equality. So many open education practices are based on equality, ensuring that all students can access course material or that every student gets an opportunity to participate in the curriculum. And this sounds great, but unfortunately, when we begin with equality, nothing changes. We are in a deeply hierarchical space. So when we give everyone the same thing, we do not change existing hierarchies. We actually end up recreating them. So right now, equality and equal opportunities statements are actually antithetical to racial justice because they do not redress power and inequities. They do not acknowledge that there are forces at work that make it so that even if we get the same things, we do not end up in the same place. Equality is a goal, yes. But it isn't the solution to racial disparities. On the other hand, if we lead with reparative justice, if we lead with an eye to intentionally repair and stop harm, when we lead with the intent to focus on uplifting and restoring those who are suffering the most under this system, we can actually then achieve equality. So reparative justice can actually get us to equality at some point. So using reparative justice as the operating framework for open education also means emphasizing healing. Healing is a large part of repairing harm. It requires time. It requires investment in the well-being of people who have been harmed. So like a medical analogy may be useful here. When the body is broken or ruptured, we first need surgery or some kind of emergency care to suture the area. But that is not the end. Arguably, the real work for the patient, anyway, begins after the surgery during the recovery when they will need the support of people who care about their recovery. They may need physical therapy or nursing care. And Malcolm X also expresses this kind of racial justice in also this kind of medical term as well. And so I like the place where he says, if you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there is no progress. If you pull it out all the way, there is still no progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow has made. Healing the wound that was created by the harm. So what if open education was fundamentally envisioned as a healing practice? Let's dream a little, right? Like beyond making course material affordable, what would it look like if at its core, who open education practices were invested in the restoration and the uplift of racially marginalized people? What if we designed our classes and are syllabi with black people and indigenous people and other people of color in mind, whether they are in our classes or not? And by the way, when we focus on centering black people and indigenous people and other people of color and other students of color, our entire teaching becomes better. When we care for the most oppressed and create conditions where the most repressed can thrive, that benefits everyone. It allows everybody to have an opportunity, a great opportunity to achieve their highest potential. Again, reparative justice can get us to equality. I also like the Combahee River Collective. This is the seminal group for black feminist thought in the United States and their manifesto says, if black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. And so, in the same way, when we focus on the most marginalized, we will go a long way toward making education systems better for everyone. And what if open education practices work to create safe and brave spaces for the most racially oppressed? Could open education, pedagogy, could open pedagogy intentionally and explicitly make space for racially marginalized students to co-create learning content that is relevant and honoring of their cultural communities? Could reusable assignments be a moment or an opportunity to collaborate with racially marginalized students to support and build and preserve and restore their cultural assets and sacred sites? What if open education material not only focused on telling stories of racial oppression but also foregrounded stories of the resistance, of the creativity, of the joy, of the beauty in communities of color? So I think, for example, about Rastafari philosophies and Rastafari liberty, which is, you know, Rastafari way of living. And out of Rastafari philosophies come, they frame Blackness and they frame Africanness as divine, right? Like as of the gods, what if open education allowed for spaces where there could be various ways in which Blackness and Indigenousness is conceptualized and experiences, the multiple experiences of Black and Indigenous people and other people of color can be expressed? And what if open education publishing platforms were dedicated to repairing epistemic violence? Gayatri Speevac refers to epistemic violence as the erasure of knowledges and the ways of knowing of the colonized by the colonizer. What if open education was committed to disrupting epistemic violence? What if it were committed to amplifying and celebrating the voices of scholars who have been excluded from the canons of every discipline in the United States specifically because of their race? And what if these platforms were committed to restoring non-Western forms of knowledge production? So for example, in Jamaica, we say mispirit takar or mispirit na takar, which is translated into English, it would mean my spirit is drawn to someone or my spirit is drawn to something. It refers to this statement in Jamaican culture refers to relying on senses and knowledges that are not recognized by Western colonial forces. It's about trusting in something that does not make sense in Western epistemology. And recently, I had the pleasure and really the honor of organizing and being a part of the Black Woman and Girls Symposium at Wake Forest University where I was able to share space with some amazing Black women who are really like presenting ways of being that are outside of the dominant Western ideas. So for example, I remember Nawal Zinacumbe who's a menstrual activist and scholar in Zimbabwe and she is researching menstrual hygiene management methods and materials used by Indigenous women in Zimbabwe. And these ideas and these materials predate colonialism. I also want to shout out to Jariah Strozer who is creating a new gender race weight matrix as a different way to assess the health of thick Black women, leaning heavily away from the deficit models of Black people that are so prevalent in conventional medicine. And a really big, you know, big, big up to Amare who created this practice called Embodiology. Amare is a professor of dance and she created Embodiology which is the practice of using movement and music to improve focus and mental alertness and communication and just overall well-being. And this this Embodiology draws on ancestral knowledge of performance within traditional West African cultures. Now these knowledge systems that these women are bringing forth have been marginalized in academia, right? Because academia considers Indigenous knowledge and attitudes and Indigenous practices as pre-scientific and therefore of no value. But what if open education practices and publishing could be used to make space for this kind of so-called otherness? What if it could be used to make space for African and Indigenous ways of knowing African and Indigenous philosophies and ontologies? And I don't mean creating a separate section or creating like a special issue because in some ways that keep that continues the othering, right? And there's some value in that so I'm not completely dismissing it. There's some value in that of course. What I am talking about though is open education publishing operating on the principle of denormalizing white Western ontologies. Right now open education platforms seem to operate more through this equity lens, right? Like through the equity model. All authors are welcome to publish including Black authors, Indigenous authors, and other authors of color. That is different though from explicitly inviting these scholars who have been ostracized, who have been marginalized to publish. It is different from prioritizing marginalized voices. If that's different from having a reparative mode of operation, right? Like what if open education publishing was built on a reparative model? So that was my second point. Reparative justice should be central in open education for it to be effectively mobilized for racial justice. This brings me to my third point. To be effectively mobilized for racial justice, open education has to be decolonized. Now Black feminists, they've been talking about decolonization for a very long time. So Bell Hooks, for example, describes decolonization as breaking the ways in which or reality is defined and shaped by the dominant culture, dominant white culture, and dominant colonial culture, and really asserting our own understanding of that reality, our own experience. And of course, Indigenous scholars around the world, they also conceptualize decolonization as dismantling dominant white world orientations. So decolonization can be envisioned as revealing and dismantling colonial powers in all their forms. Now of course, decolonization should be applied to courses. And I've heard some very interesting presentations on how Montgomery College and faculty and students are collaborating to decolonize course content. And there was also a presentation on the decolonization of curation. And that's very interesting and important work. I argue that open education as a practice, as a community has to be decolonized. For open education, this process has to begin with a honest interrogation of whiteness and Eurocentric white supremacy in how open education is conceived and practiced. We have to undo the normalization of whiteness in open education world. So first, the open education world, especially those identified as the leaders and the seminal thinkers, they remain predominantly white. And this reality is really frustrating because the major pillars of open education, you know, to democratize educational practices, to challenge established and normalized ways of learning, representational justice, these have been promoted by black and indigenous communities for decades. I'm thinking, for example, of indigenous pedagogy. And I'm thinking of bell hooks and teaching to transgress. And I'm thinking of, again, teaching as a practice of freedom and the pedagogy of the oppressed, right? Like these ideas have been circulating within racially marginalized communities for years. The central pillars of open education are borrowing from what black and indigenous people have been pursuing and practicing. And yet, black and indigenous people are excluded from advancing it. Most times, these forerunners are not even cited. And I do want to give a shout out to Robin de Rosa and to Rajiv, Gianniani, and others who are working to change this. But a lot of work still needs to be done to purposefully include black and indigenous people and other people of color into the open education world. Now, I concede that you may not be intentionally excluding black people and indigenous people from your organizations. But you are also not intentionally working to attract them either. What is your organization communicating to black people and indigenous people and other people of color? For one, the privilege of whiteness in open education communicates that open education is not committed to racial justice. Unfortunately, it has developed the reputation in the United States as being, quote, white people's work or the kind of work that white people do to shore up their own wholeness. And besides this, the privileging of whiteness also is in danger of reproducing colonialism. We don't want to perpetuate the practice of Columbus in, as some people call it, calls it, taking the intellectual property of black people and indigenous people and other people of color and calling it, calling it your own. We don't want to be reproducing that. That's another example of epistemic violence that also needs to be repaired. So open education needs to therefore intentionally include people of color, and that inclusion needs to be voluntary, it needs to be purposeful, and it needs to be equitable and just. So let's just take a moment to kind of break those apart. By voluntary, I mean that you need to put people in place who want to do it. Not all of us want to do this kind of work. We out here trying to survive. We out here trying to raise our children, navigate this toxic environment in academia. We are navigating tenure and promotion stuff that's kind of against us. So not all of us really have the energy or even the desire to do this kind of work. Some of us do. Top those people. It should be voluntary. You shouldn't just put people in place because they're people of color. It should also be purposeful. This inclusion should be purposeful, which is really the opposite of tokenism. So when black people or indigenous people or other people of color are brought into and take a seat at the table in open education, they need to be heard and not only seen, they need to be validated, and they need to be supported. Give people some resources, right? Give those a job to be done, free up some resources so that people can do the job, right? And thirdly, it needs to be equitable and it needs to be just. And yeah, that means compensation. It needs to be compensated. There is a long history of exploitative and extractionist engagement between dominantly positioned, racially dominant people and black people and indigenous people and other people of color. Let's open education as a practice and as a community break that, right? By compensating. So number one, by compensating people of color for the work that for their contributions, what it does is it helps to redistribute wealth in academia, right? We know that dominantly positioned people get huge salaries now to do so-called diversity work, you know, to come in to consult while black and indigenous people are expected to do the work, right? They should just be grateful to do this work, right? So purposeful compensation can be a corrective to this. And also, secondly, because again, there's a history of undervaluing the labor of black people and indigenous people and other people of color. When they are compensated, quite frankly, they are more likely to be underpaid than their white counterparts or white counterparts. So open education as a community should break with this. Think of this as service justice, right? It's returning tangible benefits to black people and indigenous people and other people of color for their contributions. And dismantling the normalization of whiteness in open education also means acknowledging faculty of color and their unique challenge in higher education, right? So faculty of color make up a fraction of overall faculty, but we are here and our experiences are not the same as those of our white colleagues. The implications for engaging in open education are not the same for us as they are for our white counterparts. For example, practicing open assignments, right? Or renewable assignments, for example, can be a weapon used against people of color. We are already presumed incompetent. So creating assignments and ask students to co-create with us, we are more likely to be accused of lazy teaching. And asking us to use open publishing platforms can be risky. Tenure and promotion is still based on publication and in many places the ranking of those publications. We are already less likely to receive tenure and promotion. So using unconventional publishing platforms can actually harm us, right? Like publishing in open source platforms requires privilege. It requires racial privilege, institutional privilege, having the privilege of automatic credibility, having epistemic authority, and those are often elusive for black people and indigenous people and other scholars of color, right? And so shout out to Marcel Reisbach from the opening plenary that highlighted some of this privilege. And then also, practicing open education requires the challenging of faculty power in the classroom. But remember that any power that black and indigenous people as faculty have in the classroom is very fragile and precarious. And there's a history of black and indigenous knowledges being stolen. So copyright is certainly problematic, but what protection do black and indigenous scholars have on open softwares, right? Open education can certainly provide wonderful spaces for black and indigenous people and other people of color, but that is not automatic or guaranteed. Open education has to be decolonized so that it can be safe spaces for all of us, right? So apart from dismantling whiteness in open education, open education should also be cultivating empathy, right? Like open education as a community rather should cultivate empathy for black and indigenous, for their black and indigenous colleagues and other colleagues of color. And so I know that, you know, we want to build a community and we often talk about an open education community, but we cannot have community without addressing racial disparities among us. If open education does not address racial disparities, then to borrow Robin Kelly's framework, your freedom dream might very well become our nightmare. That's my third point, right? Like needs to be open education should be decolonized. And finally, fourth, to be effectively mobilized for racial justice, open education has to be practiced with love. Now I am not talking about the rom-com kind of love, right? I'm not talking about the kind of love that is paternalistic, you know, that is set on saving black people and brown people and indigenous people. I'm not talking about a love that is born from guilt or pity or, you know, that is expressed in white tears. I'm not talking about a love that advocates for grace without justice or a love that asks people of color, especially black people, to remain civil while we are being persecuted. No, no. I am talking about a radical love for black people, brown people, indigenous people, and other people of color. What does that look like? Well, it could show up in a variety of ways, but here are a few things that come to mind. It would, a radical love would be a love that rejects all colonial world views that have been placed upon us. It would be a love that wants to see black people and indigenous people and other people of color genuinely want to see us survive and thrive. It would be a love that moves white people from allyship to advocacy, that moves from helping to supporting, right, like in ways that preserve the agency and sovereignty of black people and indigenous people and other people of color. And it would be a love that refuses to retreat to the comfort of, you know, whiteness or retreat to the comfort of what Robin D'Angelo calls white fragility, but is willing to stay in discomfort to address white supremacy. Now, of all of these points, this is perhaps the most difficult because it is the most personal. It cannot be taught. It has to be cultivated. It requires introspection and honesty, and it cannot be easily measured, you know, in a conventional assessment tool. But this is an important point. This point of love is an important point. And I want to leave with you this quote by Robin Kelly in his book, Freedom Dreams, where he says, love and imagination may be the most revolutionary impulses available to us. And yet we have failed to understand their political importance and respect them as powerful social forces. He goes on to say that the catalyst for political engagement has never been misery, poverty, or oppression. People are drawn to social movement because of hope. Their dreams of a new world radically different from the one they inherited. Now, using this as a point of departure, open education practices are most effective to pursue racial justice when they are conceived and conceptualized in this kind of radical love. With a little imagination and a little dreaming. So thank you. I'm going to stop there and I'll see if you have any questions, but more so more conversations, right? Like, let's have a conversation or the beginnings of a conversation. Thank you so much, Camille. What a wonderful way for us to wrap up our conference this week. I don't know if you've had a chance to notice in the chat, there's a lot of love, a lot of love in the chat, and a lot of appreciation for your message today. So thank you. We do have some time to take questions. And so I just want to remember, remind folks to use the Q&A feature to put your questions in there. And I will start with a first question. What are some of the open public publication journals that you would recommend? Thank you for that question. So I am not, I'm going to just fully admit that like open education journals and publishing is not fully my lane. And so I'm going to ask if anybody else has any who knows about other kinds of open education platforms that may be doing this kind of reparative work to put that in the chat. I will say that I have learned from this conference, for example, there's a Rotel grant, a Rotel, I believe that's how you say it, grant that is compensating faculty for developing textbooks, I believe, or other kinds of teaching material that would, that has the potential to be reparative in that they're supporting the voices of underserved people, like wanting to produce textbooks that would support the voices of underserved people. And so I think that that is certainly an area there. And then I'm also thinking about another initiative in California, I think the California consortium that includes some community colleges that they're also doing this kind of work, this kind of they're doing work that has the potential to be reparative, meaning that they are encouraging scholars and making space for explicitly making space for the voices of underserved, racially underserved people to put forward their ideas and to put forward ideas that are different from what has been conventionally seen as the norm. Great, thanks. Another question is, are university finally hired a DEI administrator? How do we make sure that we approach this new administrator in a way that our OER program can be fully aligned to their goals? Yeah, thank you for that question. Now, so first I have to just, I have to say that my institution also hired a diversity, well, a chief diversity officer. One of the disappointing things, not only about this particular position, but about positions such as these, is that it's often done in a very reactionary way. So something happened, students protested, let's get somebody on campus who can handle all of this. And so often that person is being brought into a space where maybe they don't even have enough resources to do what they want to do. They're being brought into a space where they are expected to do that thing by themselves. And it's also precarious, right? They don't have tenure, they don't have, you know, they don't have those kinds of security that other faculty, that other people in the institution may have. And so I want to say that I want to, I want to preface my statement with that because I know going to work with these, you know, DEI persons can be challenging because they may not be able to do exactly even what they set out to do. They have to work within a particular, within the particular constraints of DEI, for example. That being said though, I believe that my point would be that if we approach this as this is, here is an initiative that can further the job that you want to do around racial equity, right? Like if we foreground the desire for racial equity and the need to pursue racial equity and then open education being one of the ways to do this, then I do believe that it can be rolled in with the other kinds of racial equity initiatives that that person may do on campus. Again, within the constraints of that institution. So in terms of approaching my, so my, you have to know the very specific circumstance and, you know, different institutions have different kind of, you know, constraints. I would, I would think that you would approach that person as wanting to contribute to the work toward uplifting and restoring people of color, Black people and Indigenous people in your, in your institution, yes, but then also just kind of as a moral imperative as a way to transform the institution. And that's another thing as well, another approach to it as well. If your role here is to, you know, help to pursue equity on campus, then let's transform the institution. And here is one way to transform the pedagogy of the institution. Those two things just come to mind, but please, if there are other people, there are so many people who have already been thinking about this and who are doing this work that if you have other ideas as well, please put them in the chat. Thank you. We have a couple of questions about the focus on tokenization. So the first one is how can we incentivize faculty and students of color to participate in targeted open publishing opportunities without this work tokenizing them? Yeah. I would go back to say that one is the, I think, volunteer voluntary work. Again, you be empathetic because, for example, as a Black woman in the academy wanting to do the kinds of work that I want to do, I am hyper visible. And so, you know, like, I may not necessarily be able to be out front and or I may not even want to necessarily be out front because I'm already taking on the challenges of just surviving in this institution. So I would say lead with some empathy around it. And it's going to take some patience, right? There's been a lot of reasons to distrust institutions of higher education. There are a lot of reasons for Black people and Indigenous people to not want to trust anything that's within the academy because of the way that the academy has exploited us. And so it will take some patience. But I would say that it should be voluntary. I would absolutely say that if it can be compensated and stipend, that would also be great. But again, just moving with some grace and some patience because this continues to be a space that's not very welcoming and not very accepting of Black people and Indigenous people, an African-centered and Indigenous-centered thought. So you can't blame, you can't blame faculty, a particular Black faculty and Indigenous faculty if they're going to tread lightly. So approach in terms of volunteering and in terms of it being compensated and making sure that the outlet or the publisher, the publishing platform that you are asking them to come to, make sure that it actually has a vision and it actually has like a purposeful a vision of uplifting and repairing and restoring voices and not tokenizing. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes when it is a special issue or something happened in 2020, George Floyd was murdered. So let's do this special issue. It can feel like that. So make sure that the platform itself and the publishing itself as an operating practice, that it is very much reparative and restorative and not only, they're not only using that as a kind of token to appease or to kind of react to something that's already going on. Great. Thanks Camille. The other question about tokenization was about a library that wants to leverage the diversity funds at the university to create an OER library and position for an early career librarian of color. What suggestions do you have to keep that position from being a tokenized position? Oh. So first of all, I think that that is wonderful. And if you are, there's, I can see how there can be potential pushback for something like that. Often when you try to do something reparative, when you say that we want this position specifically for a black person or an indigenous person or a person of color, you get pushed back from it, ironically using the equality argument or the meritocracy argument. So that sounds like a wonderful thing in terms of wanting to be very explicit about bringing a minority, a racial minority person there. Part of what, part of some of the challenges with doing this work, especially when you're brought on in that specific role is access to resources. So I believe that that if you are going to bring somebody on to do the work, make sure that you have the things in place to have the person succeed in doing the work. If not, then you really just want your face. You really just want their, their, their likeness so that you can say that you've hired somebody. So make sure that it's like, purposefully you have some funds and here will be the funds. I know that when, especially if it's a predominantly white institution, I know that when people are, people of color are going to be looking for, for these kinds of jobs. One of the things that they'll be looking for is how committed are you to this? Show that you're committed by telling them, you know, show the money. If for some of us who are old enough or been in this culture enough, you know, to show the money, show, show the resources. Here's what you'll have. Here's what you'll be able to do. Here is your staff. Here is your show that you're serious about having this person do the work by demonstrating the resources that this person will have. I think that that will go a long way in indicating that you're not just bringing the person on because they're a person of color and because you need to appease some kind of cool diversity initiative. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Camille. Unfortunately, we are at time. I know there are more questions that folks have for you. And again, like there's so much appreciation for your message today and for your energy. So just want to thank you again for such an inspiring keynote this afternoon. Thank you so much, Susan, and for Open Education Conference for having me. And thank you everybody for coming. Absolutely. Awesome. So I think I'm going to pass it to Tanja at this point to move into our closing remarks for the conference. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, everyone, for attending our conference. What a closing and what a week. In order for us to start our closing, we will have the use of the Mentimeter just to get your overall viewpoint in reference to our conference. Tanja, I'm happy to tap in here with you as well. If folks would pull out their phones or devices and go ahead and get connected to our mentee. So that's mentee.com. And then you'll type in that code you see there at the top, which is 63964969. If that doesn't work for you, or if you would like an alternate way to access that, you can click on the Menti link. I see that someone has been kind enough to drop that in the chat for us. And we've got just a few questions for you to get some reflections going here. Thank you, Brianna. I couldn't pull it up. I got it now. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Absolutely. So as we continue on again with the Mentimeter setup, again, it will allow you to give us information pertaining to reflections and what's going to be next for us in the open educational community. Our first question asks, where are you joining us from? So we know that we asked you this in the first part of our conference where we had an attending map, but we would really like to give a overall viewpoint in reference to where everybody's coming from and hopefully give them a great shout out. So we have California and Texas, of course, always representing. We have British Columbia, the Czech Republic. And as we said before in our opening that OER is most definitely global. So speaking of globalization, we also are going to be looking at Alberta, Canada. We have Hawaii. Looked like I saw someone else on there. Oh, the Coast Terries. Did I see that? Yeah. So with that being said, we're going to go to our next slide, which will ask you, thank you guys for this participation. What is one thing you got out of this conference? I know that we had a lot going on this week and a lot to absorb. So if you just can just breathe in and think back and just let us know, what did you get out of this conference? New resources, ideas, energy, that's great. Take that energy and continue to rise. I see a lot of energy. This keynote, it was amazing, wasn't it? Inspiration, which I hope you got from this keynote as well. Focus on equity. Friends, I know the social aspect was awesome. We had our mocktails last night. You had Kahoot, but with Rachel, it was just been amazing. Community, experiences for student and faculty. Our student panel on Monday was simply amazing. So you guys really are receiving a lot. That's ideas about Open Pedagogy. Again, Pedagogy continues to improve and evolve totally depending upon your audience and your class. Open Pedagogy will continue to evolve. So this is great. Connecting with so many amazing peers. Yes, we do have a wonderful community, don't we? And our last question that we're going to ask of you is, what is one action? Because remember what our theme is, rise to action. Large or small, are you going to take to make education more open and equitable? Mobilize our community. Try to build on the advocacy at your campus. Remember again, guys, we're just taking this one step at a time. But our goal and our challenge to rise is to most definitely spread the word at our institution and our community and outside of our community. We need to bring new people in to let them know exactly what's going on in order for us to grow. Connect with Falcon and staff of color. Working on integrating Open Pedagogy. Again, we got this again in reference to bringing in others. Very good. This is exactly what we're looking for. To implement a plan of action. Yes, we have to. I hope some of you may be visual. You write it down. Once you cross it off, you feel a sense of accomplishment. That's great. Keep being fabulous. That's what we are here in this community. Promote OER. That's great. All right. Wonderful. Thank you again for those comments. These comments will be saved in order for us to compile them and then get some information around off back to you in reference to your questions that were asked today. Again, I want to reiterate what a closing and a week. On behalf of the board, in closing our conference, we would like to thank each of you for making this year's conference a rememberable one with so many amazing workshops presented by and addressing the interests of our community. Our community, which consists of faculty, students, librarians, administrators, instructional designers, and so many other collaborators were in attendance this week. Utilizing our attending map, we had speakers and attendees from around the world. And you just saw that from your mentee. From the likes of Peru, Denmark, Canada, Pakistan, Tuscany, Idaho, Hawaii, New York, Canada, and many other places. So if you think you missed any of these memories or just want to relive them again, the recordings are currently available to you. We hope that you created memories not only from the workshop, which includes the plenaries, which were orchestrated by students, feminists, ecologists, and community leader, but we were able to create memories as social activities such as the Kahoo and Mocktails and many others during the week. We hope during your attendance, you have the opportunity to think how you will rise to action in our community. We hope you will join us at the reception that follows our closing and let us know what your plans are to continue to rise and also any ideas or thoughts pertaining to this week conference and next years as well. Our Open Ed Conference 2022 closing will now come to will continue as you will hear remarks from other board members. I will now pass the baton to Amanda Lawson. You'd think I'd know where the video button was. Hi everybody, before we move into our formal thank yous to the folks who've made this conference possible, I'd just like to offer a few words of reflection about this year's conference. I've been a part of the planning process for the conference since 2020 and this year I believe we've really hit our stride. Our theme rise to action and commitment to being as inclusive as possible led to a program where the conference strategic vision was holistically represented throughout all the sessions that I attended this week. I kicked off my week with the student plenary that set the tone for how central students are to the action that we take in our work and the impact the open that open education can have on their lives. A theme that I saw repeated in sessions on open pedagogy, ungrading, and OER programs. There's also space for practitioners to come together and be vulnerable and share how we do the work, how lonely it can be at times, and how much we turn to each other for support. When asked in one of the debrief sessions how we felt about the conference so far, I could think of only one word, home. This year felt like a home coming to me and I'm leaving with a well that's been refilled. And while we can and should always strive to make the conference more inclusive and more transparent, this year's conference was incredible. And I can't wait to revisit the sessions that I attended to implement ideas that I've learned into my work and watch sessions I didn't get through throughout the rest of the year for sustained professional development. I am immensely grateful for the community volunteers and organizers who continue to champion this conference every year. I hope that you leave inspired and ready to decide how you'll rise to action in your work over the next year. Over to you Susan. Thank you Amanda. So we want to take time now to acknowledge and appreciate the folks who volunteered their time over the summer and in the weeks leading up to the conference. As someone who's relatively new to this community, I can say that I've been really impressed by the dedication of our volunteers and just want to acknowledge, as others have said, that the conference absolutely would not happen without them. So first, a big thank you to everyone who participated in the initial review of proposals. This is a big lift and it's so valuable to have multiple perspectives as part of that process. Next, I want to thank our video reviewers. These folks made sure that all of the prerecorded sessions were accessible. And so thank you for the time you spent previewing those. And then on behalf of myself and the other co-chair of the program committee, Alita Pardosudarso. Sorry Alita. I want to say thank you to our small but mighty team who put in many hours of work reviewing proposals and helping to finalize the program for what I hope was a rich learning experience for each of you. So thank you program committee. And I will pass it to Stephanie. Thank you Susan. I'd like to also thank the engagement committee. The engagement committee is extremely important and made sure this conference is both fun, interactive, and has lots of social and networking opportunities. This is no easy task with a virtual conference. So thank you to the engagement committee. Great work everybody. Next slide please. And we would also like to thank our session hosts, people who run the sessions, admit the attendees, start the recording, and make sure the conference code of conduct is upheld. This event could not run smoothly without our session hosts, many of whom are board members but also many volunteers. We really appreciate their time and commitment. And now I will hand it over to Hailey. All right. Hi everyone. So if we could just hop over to the next slide. Perfect. My name's Hailey. I'm the open education project manager at Spark and I've had the immense pleasure of being able to support the board over the last year. I've been given about a minute to sum up my gratitude for this group of individuals and I'm not sure how I'm going to do that, but I'll try my best. Each of the people on your screen has really stepped up in a way that I honestly can't even begin to describe over the last year. The conference is at a very sort of pivotal moment where there are many decisions to be made about the strategic future. And each of these board members have given so much of their time and energy to address these questions. Their passion and commitment to this work comes through in the way that they continue to show up week after week at our meetings and so on. They've been putting in the work, you know, not just in the weeks leading up to this but over the past year. So I want to give a special shout out to Rachel and Tonja who led our community engagement committee, to Susan and Alita who did the same with our program planning committee, to Sam and Rachel who have really spearheaded our finance work and to Stephanie for fearlessly leading our board meetings. But of course, you know, every single person on the screen has really really showed up in a way that brings their lived experience and expertise to make the conference what it is today. So thank you so much to all of you. It's been an absolute pleasure and I can't wait to see where the board leads the conference next year. So I'll go ahead and turn it over to Rachel now. Hello everyone. We would like to thank our conference team. Without them, this could not have happened. The people at Spark, specifically Aasha Law, Crystal Bessesar, Kim Hensie, and from Spark, Aisha, Brianna, Haley, Nicole, we appreciate you all so much. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, the Hewlett Foundation, the Mickelson 20 million minds foundation, OpenStacks and Rice without all of you. This conference would not have been possible and we appreciate you so so much. Thank you. Now I'm going to go ahead and pass it on to Brianna who will discuss passing the torch. Thanks so much, Rachel. Hi, everyone. I'm Brianna. I'm the Open Education Conference Manager. As we close out this year's conference and look ahead to next year 2023, I just wanted to take a minute to remind everyone about the upcoming election. The OpenEd conference is looking for six new members to serve on the board of directors. Those new members will serve for a two-year term starting in January 2023. So if you're interested, please remember to nominate yourself by the deadline, which is October 28th. I'll go ahead and drop that link in the chat. If any of you are interested, we've got a whole FAQ page on our website and now I will pass the mic over to Sam. Thank you all and I also want to echo Amanda. I feel like I'm home when I'm here and part of this group. I have just, it's been a wonderful heartwarming and filling week. I do want to encourage all of you to complete the survey for next year's conference and carrying out your reflections. We really, really want to hear from you so that we can continue to make this conference really focus on your needs, your desires, and really focused on the community. The link to the survey form is in the chat. And so I really want to thank you all and say, please, please, please let us know what you're thinking. There is some conversation about what next year's conference will be like. I know I see in the chat people arguing for or asking for more virtual and those who would like us to move back into person, we are considering trying to figure out how do we do both those things or do all of those things, both virtual and in person. So please make sure that you fill out your survey and let us know what you think. And I'm going to hand this over to Tanya for our final goodbyes, except for if you come to the reception after, we'll see you there. Thank you, Sam. Again, on behalf of the board, it has been an honor serving you for the Open Ed Conference 2022 Rise to Action. If you would like to network or have additional comments or questions as Sam just stated, please join us for the closing reception to continue to network. Until then, see you next year as we continue to rise. Thank you.