 Excellent. Awesome. Thank you, Emily, for getting us set up. Hey everybody. Thanks for joining our session. I know it's all different time zones around the world, so we're grateful that you're joining us, whether it's dinner time, nighttime, lunchtime, breakfast time, I don't know, whatever other times there are. I live most of my life oriented around food, so that's how I measure. If you would be willing to, we'd love to have everybody just introduce yourself in the chat, your institution, organization, district, state, any information that you're willing to send. We'd love to just know who's here with us today as we're talking about this conversation. So we're going to give folks just one more minute. Hey, Amanda. Welcome. Welcome. Hi, Don. Thanks for joining. Really quickly just introduce myself. My name is Ethan Sonek. I work with ISCME. I'm the chief of staff there. I have been working in the open education space for a while, but my background is mostly in sort of the campaigns and organizing side of things and advocacy work. I throw it over to my co-host to introduce herself, and then we'll get started. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today from all over. I'm Mindy Boland, the director of OER services at ISCME, so my team and I run OER Commons and all of our partner services implementations and my background is in textbook publishing, but I have been working with ISCME for the past six years. Awesome. Thanks, Mindy. So you all are here for our talk beyond open intersections with accessibility, cultural responsiveness, and broader educational goals. Really quickly just about our organization ISCME is a nonprofit. We were founded back in 2002. I'm pretty sure Amy is also here from our organization. Amy, you should check me on that. I think that's right. Amy says yes. I had that pernicious moment of doubt where I was like, I wonder if I typed that right. We do a whole bunch of work. Our mission is around making education more participatory, equitable, and open. We're going to talk a little bit about how we go about that in a second, but many of you may know us from one of our biggest projects, which is OER Commons. So ISCME is actually the organization that helps run OER Commons. We often do them branded differently, but just so you know, we're the team behind that. Before I jump in, we really wanted to focus this session on some of our learnings around how to navigate these intersections. And before I jump into that, I wanted to talk just really quickly, sort of from the 10,000 foot view, why this topic matters. And I think the biggest thing that we've realized in the last 10, 15, 20 years of our advocacy around open education is that openness does not inherently mean equity and justice. You have things like the digital divide, you have potential for exploitation. There's, you know, great writings from Audrey Waters about that. Licensing itself doesn't actually say anything about representation or authorship. And so there's a recognition that one does not inherently lead to the other. And this gap has driven so much conversation about OER's intersection with other topics. You know, you can just look at the themes of this conference to see how that conversation has shifted over the years. And so we really want to talk a little bit more about those intersections, how we've navigated them, what we've learned about from our work in those spaces. And just from the 10,000 foot view that I wanted to name is that, you know, OER has traditionally benefited from being a niche thing. We don't get sucked into thorny convos. Most of our opposition comes from, you know, publishers or, you know, just around concerns and confusion about copyright, things like that. I'm not going to say that that's easy, but we have been able to avoid a lot of these much bigger, hard conversations that are happening in society today. And that safety is directly in tension with our goals of mainstreaming OER, right, in order to reach the mainstream we need to engage in those bigger conversations. And navigating that tension is really interesting if we want to mainstream it means letting go of some of that safety and moving into harder conversations. Doing that is challenging. So as I said before, I think what we wanted to do today is just to talk about what we've learned in trying to explore those intersections and navigating those tensions. I want to try to really focus in on just some specific learnings from those things. So we're going to talk a little bit just about sort of the what that we do but mostly dig into how and what we've learned. And then we're also going to recommend some useful resources and things that you can click over to right away if you want to get started with those. So it's free to throw comments and thoughts in the chat we're going to leave some time for discussion at the end. But yeah, so so that's sort of the 10,000 foot. And then I just wanted to share this one slide sort of coming back down to the ground level. This was the result of a study by Ed week, which took place last year so there has been some shift in the field since then. What they found is that 84% of teachers said that they were willing to teach or implement anti racist curriculum, while only 14% of teachers said they felt like they had the professional development and the resources to do so. I think you couldn't ask for a clearer depiction of the potential for openness and the potential impact we can have. Not just in anti racist work but around accessibility and so many other intersections. So we're just going to be talking about a couple of those today. My last quick note, we are going to be using some US specific maps and statistics and things but we were intentional to phrase a lot of the learnings to apply more broadly to everybody. So that's just a little bit about why this topic matters and I'm going to throw it to Mindy to just talk to you a little bit more about this. So as Ethan correctly stated is community was founded in 2002. We really started as a research institute looking at how teachers perform continuous improvement on curriculum over time. But about six years ago we shifted to kind of a more sustainable services model we still do grant and philanthropically funded research, but we offer a number of services which you can see here on the left to support educators. In their journey through OER and open and ultimately through to hopefully social justice. This map here shows the states that we've been working in so we have a lot of great coverage in the US we've done professional learning built hubs and micro sites for these folks and continue to partner with them on their OER initiatives. We also work internationally we do work with NGOs like UNESCO and Alexa. And so while this is US specific in the map we are we try to have a nice global view of the work. So talking today we really want to think about accessibility and culturally responsive teaching and I wanted to talk a little bit about how these, this approach here on the screen has been kind of applied in that space. So tools and platform on OER Commons and on the micro sites that we have built. We've integrated some tools to make authored OER more accessible including an accessibility checker which will kind of run through a resource that's been created and check it for accessibility attributes and give you an opportunity to remediate. We've also developed EPUB three downloads that are braille friendly and screen reader friendly and working with our partners at CAS to ensure that even the math ML worked on those EPUB downloads. We've developed some simple checklists for folks when they're creating resources that they can look at to ensure that they're kind of meeting all of the greatest hits of accessibility. So in the, in the sort of the CRT realm culturally responsive teaching we're also developing a tool for identifying bias in sources. In other areas in our research work we partnered with CAS to research how educators understand accessibility metadata. And we've worked with SCORE to research the best ways to apply accessibility metadata to STEM illustrations. And we've also done a lot of research on how we can continue to do work on DEIA tools and internal work around inclusivity and unconscious bias. One of the areas where we really started with services and actually I think they originally started as being a grant funded thing that we did was professional learning and a lot of our early professional learning was about, you know, what is OER. And we've really kind of built on that we continue to talk about, you know, foundational open education practice and, and doing that kind of training but we also have been expanding the way that we think about our professional learning. So we've gotten past the idea of we build you a hub or a digital library everyone's going to come and use it just like that that doesn't really work. And we found that as we do professional learning it really brings folks into the platform and the work and makes it a part of their kind of regular workflows. But in addition to that we started doing these trainings around curriculum evaluation so we were working with some of our partners to have their teachers evaluate resources for alignment to their state standards for example. And as we did that we thought well what are some other ways that you might evaluate resources and started looking at doing evaluations for culturally responsiveness and for accessibility. I think we're going to get into our learnings later but we have done several iterations on the culturally responsive teacher training, finding that for example, doing a two week Academy with three webinars was just not enough time to do that kind of deep work. So we really have been kind of evolving the way that we approach these trainings and I think that's you know it's a big part of what we want to share with you today. Awesome thanks Mindy. I think I didn't say this explicitly but we do, we do a ton of work in K 12 but we also work with lots of higher institutions so while some of this stuff may seem more relevant to K 12 I think actually the learnings about engaging in these intersections and navigating apply to talk to both. Absolutely. Just a little bit just about who we are and and and what we do and how we've learned the things that we've learned and how much we have left to learn. What we want what we wanted to do is just zoom out and talk a little bit about two specific examples so culturally responsive teaching and accessibility. So, we're just going to share a couple of sort of broad stroke lessons that we've learned. The first one being that this work is not one size fits all students are at different levels educators are at different levels there are different levels of comfort in engaging in these conversations different, different levels of ability and vocabulary around life. And so, you know and that's not even taking into account sort of regional geographical cultural differences. A key piece of being successful in culturally responsive teaching is to be localized be individualized be responsive, which obviously aligns with the term to the needs of the learners of the institution or the district, whatever it is and so this is both a challenge, because it means you can't just make one slide deck for everybody, you do really have to do the deep work of localizing and contexting for for different environments. So I kind of touched on this a little bit. It takes time to do this work you know I what what we've found is that you have to kind of make take the time for your participants to be comfortable in the conversation because it is. It's challenging and people can find it, you know, a little bit emotional or they may find themselves a defensive so really taking the time to give people the space to become comfortable with this work to understand that. It's not sort of one linear path forward there's going to be some some backslides and some sort of remediation as you go and you need to take the time to do that and to lay a strong foundation of safety of psychological safety for your participants and just to ensure that you kind of get the full breadth of the of the work. We've found that, you know, building a team of facilitators that reflects the learner is really important and it's not just, you know, it's not like it's me isn't coming in and telling folks how to do this work we like to partner with experts in the field but we also like to bring in local experts who do this work in the state or the district or whatever the context is so that they can kind of connect better with the participants and ensure that they're really reflecting sort of the the learner's experience and the regional differences of the work so building a strong team like that is really really important. Okay. Also to identify resources that facilitate adaptation and localization. So, you know, there's a lot of resources out there and you want to be able to give your participants an opportunity to think about how they might adapt those resources and make them more culturally responsive to their specific context and so you want to have the materials that are going to let you do that so that it doesn't become frustrating. The beauty of we are is that you can remix things and so finding we are that can be remixed in the context of the training is really important as well. I think we did some work allowing or having our participants just sort of flag resources that they were emergent in the space if they weren't able to remix them right on the spot but having something to make sure that folks can really have kind of that applied approach to remixing for cultural responsibility is really important too. Yeah. Yeah, this is an open ed presentation after all. Maybe we're not saying it explicitly enough but openness is sort of the lever behind the ability to do all of these things. Like I said, I said at the beginning, you know, it doesn't inherently lead to justice for for a variety of reasons but it enables the pursuit of that. And, you know, looking at the things on this list and it's not one size fits all it takes time, you know, find local experts subject matter experts. All of those things are enabled because of openness and because of open licensing. The next thing the next big learning that I think we have is just to lead with humility and empathy. As Mindy said, you know, we aren't the experts on local contexts we aren't the experts on all cultures we have blind spots ourselves and it's so important to go into this work, sort of acknowledging that, you know, being ready to address it being ready to learn and to make mistakes, and to really make sure you're understanding where the learners are and where the educators are. So leading with humility and empathy also very important. The next thing that I wanted to do is just talk briefly about messaging around culturally responsive teaching. As I'm sure everyone in the education spaces where right like there's a huge amount of heat and pressure around what gets taught in classrooms right now, you know, there's the unfortunate parallel with critical race theory because there's a acronym that muddies the conversation significantly. But, you know, in doing this work, you do need to be super intentional about how you talk about it and how you message it. And because clarity of message and clarity of narrative will help prepare people for the conversation make sure they're informed to make sure they're ready to take on this work. I want to share just sort of three tips that I have for talking about culturally responsive teaching, why it's important why it's, you know, why it's worthwhile to do. The first thing is to bring the context and ground the conversation in the fact that culturally responsive teaching has clear demonstrable benefits for students, you know when students research shows that when their experiences and identities are seen in their learning materials and reflected, they reflected they do better. And then the other piece of that is that this is a long standing proven educational practice there's an amazing history of educators, authors, instructional designers discussing it, you know, all the way from Gloria lads and things in the 90s to Geneva gay and so many others, leading the conversation around this, you know the very first standard on the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards is to recognize individual differences in students and adjust your practice accordingly. So grounding this work, just in the fact that it has clear benefits has a demonstrable track record is super important. Second thing is just to center this on the impact right culturally responsive teaching is about providing an honest education that values all students. You know we were saying this before but a one size fits all approach doesn't fit all students equally and acknowledging that upfront, you know naming it as a way to provide more honest teaching that values and diversity of experiences. You know, that's a step towards collective liberation and incredibly powerful. The third thing is just that this is deeply embedded in state educational goals and institutional educational goals. Already. This isn't a fight, you know that we're just on the cusp of this is this has already been included in state educational standards for years. This is some data from New America study on state educational standards. We hear 46 states have explicit educational goals around diversity and expected and respecting differences and 42 out of 50 states have educational standards around culturally needed instruction so I think it's really important for us when we look at this work we context it as helping these institutions helping these districts these states meet their goals, rather than us coming in and telling them they should have different goals. A quick, that's the, that's the 10,000 foot picture of some of the learnings we've had. I'm going to throw it back to Mindy just because we wanted to come down from that 10,000 foot level, and also offer just some specific resources and tools that you can start using tomorrow to get you started on this. So the first tool that we wanted to share with you and I noticed that Barbara is on this call so Barbara can kudos to you but is the Washington Office of Superintendent public instruction auspies screening for bias content and instructional materials I believe this was recently revised and it's one of their, they've done a great work in creating this tool for evaluating resources for bias. And I know lots of folks have asked about sharing the presentation all of these links and the presentation will be available so stand by for that. So this is working on a of our own framework that does take some of this into account as well as other tools similar to this. This is a tool created by branch ed the equity rubric for oer evaluation, you can see the URL for it down there. And this is if you're from higher ed you may want to reflect on this a little more closely this is designed for a higher educational setting. And this is another another rubric for for checking out we are evaluating it. Yeah branch ed is a really cool organization their focus is on in their words, amplifying the unique contributions that minority serving institutions offer in training highly effective diverse educators for America's classrooms. So, you know, in terms of listening to the experts, they're an amazing organization that we've been, we've been excited to partner with and they've created some obviously incredible materials. Absolutely. The last one is the new America culturally responsive teaching reflection guide and it includes these eight competencies for culturally responsive teaching and I just wanted to you know this has been foundational in the way that we've designed our professional learning around CRT really looking especially at the first four competencies here as they apply most directly to curriculum but I think this is just one of those one of those papers that has become kind of a cornerstone of this work and something that's really been valuable for our for our team as we design trainings. Yeah. So we're going to pivot just to talk about a different example and kind of dive into that which is around accessibility. And we've learned sort of a handful of there's going to be obviously some some significant parallels with our work around culturally responsive teaching, but some different things that we wanted to take a second to highlight as well. So I mentioned earlier some of the, the research that we've done with educators around accessible metadata and I think that relates here because we found you know a lot of educators when they're evaluating resources for accessibility are not exactly sure on how to talk about it or what to look for to evaluate resources they've often come at at the accessibility needs through specific student accommodations. So we found that having this nice foundation, where you can give them the foundation knowledge they need and then those tools to implement it is critical because this work is very complex it's multi layered it's not just about skills it's also about developing that confidence in this space. So, you know, being able to leverage can build community in these spaces through evaluation sort of developing this this dialogue with educators for evaluating resources and really helpful. So, weighing the differences between born accessible and retrofitted content. So my partner is a cast Louise Perez, it has a wonderful metaphor for this that I just wanted to call him out because I'm not going to pretend it's mine but do you think about when you are making blueberry muffins and you want to have all of the blueberries mixed into your muffin right so you want it to be born that way. So the good, a good, a good assortment of your blueberries. If you're going back in and you're retrofitting something that's already there you can try putting all your blueberries on top or you could cut it in half and kind of smear them in the middle, but it's still going to be not as good as the kind of born, born accessible blueberry muffin that has been thought through from the start with the with accessibility in mind. And I, and I think, you know, I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second but a big part of this to an accessibility work culturally responsive teaching sort of all of these intersections, it's, it's so important to work towards better, not towards perfect. This opens up a huge philosophical can of worms about, you know, how, how we can move along our own journeys of discovery towards liberation and rejecting racism and all of that. But it's so important to just take that first step. The reality with this work is that the goalposts will move, and they should move as we learn more and we as we learn more and discover more. So I think, going into efforts around accessibility around culturally responsive teaching. It's so important to just acknowledge that upfront with yourself and with your organization or your institution. You can't just do a checklist and be done. There's tech checklists that we're going to talk about in a second can be helpful. Like you check a box and you're done these goalposts will hopefully keep moving and keep advancing and keep pushing that boundary. So just being upfront about that is is super important. The, the last thing in this sort of goes back to what Mindy was talking about the tension between openness and accessibility. With open education, creation of resources is so distributed and it comes from a variety of places and it can be piecemeal it can be ad hoc it can be community based. It can come from so many different ways decentralized distributed. At the same time, what what is sort of needed for good accessible content is to have someone owning, owning that responsibility, you know whether it's the original author whether it's, you know someone else coming in and adapting the work. This goes back to what Mindy was saying about born accessible versus baked in or born accessible versus retrofitted is the term we use for it. So there is a tension that we do have to be mindful of because, you know, if a work isn't born accessible, if a resource isn't born accessible, accessible. There is effort and work required to get it there to a point where it is accessible to all in line with the theme of this conference. And so it's just something to be really intentional intentional about and mindful of that there is does need to be an ownership and responsibility there. So again, I'm going to ask many of you is going to run through a couple of just practical examples that you can look at to just start start your journey on this. And again, we will share all of these links out as well. So cast has created a multitude of wonderful resources for creating accessible documents and presentations and content more broadly, and we have the pleasure of having being partners with them and they have a hub on we are comments where you can access all of the resources that they have created to support accessibility. So that is the first one there. The open author accessibility checker I mentioned this earlier it's something that is built into open author which is the authoring tool on our OER Commons platform. And what it does is you click this button in the top left corner and it will run through your content and tell you where things are not accessible and give you an opportunity to remediate it right there and fix it. So wonderful tool if you are authoring content and want to just give it that last check. Again, it's not checklist, but this is a way to kind of go through your resource and keep you mindful about the things you need to consider. And the last one I wanted to call out is the BC campus accessibility toolkit. This is a wonderful full press books about accessibility we have taken some of the highlights and made it a short checklist on OER Commons for folks who are with open author, but this is a deeper look at making sure that your content is accessible and that you are meeting all of the needs of your learners. Awesome. So that was obviously a ton of content and you know I think there were there were so many elements of this that we want to talk about and you know we'd love to talk about more even just defining CRT and the different aspects of that defining accessibility and the conversations. So we tried to structure this to just be really direct and kind of downloading some of the best practices, some resources that you can use. And this is something this is many in my contact information but we did actually end just one minute past where we wanted to be in order to save 10 minutes for for discussion and for questions. I would love to, if folks want to come off of mute or add comments into the chat. There's a couple of questions here that I would be really curious your answers to what resonates with you from this conversation or the things that stood out, you know, that you would share on top of what we talked about. If, if anyone wants to come off of mute or drop comments in the chat we would love to just take a few minutes to kind of hear from all of you, and answer questions if, if, if you have any. I have a question from Amanda in the chat. I'm curious if folks have used open pedagogy as a way to adapt their content to be culturally responsive so I'm guessing this is sort of asking if there's anybody on this call who's used sort of open pedagogy pedagogy student generated content. I don't know off the top of my head Mindy might. I think that it has been an approach that we've seen in our professional learning where you can kind of use an existing resource and then frame it, you know, to kind of have that teaching moment around the cultural responsibility. Yeah, that's great. And if other folks want to chime in on that, please, please do there's a great comment from Jennifer in the chat work towards better not perfect. My school won't allow we are unless it is perfect in regards to accessibility. There's fear of getting sued. I think this is this is a really good point and thanks for, thanks for naming that. There's a difference between, I think, legally mandated accessibility and what right like perfect accessibility is and I think maybe we could have framed what we said they're a little bit differently. Because, you know, they're, you know, when you think about perfect accessibility you kind of get into this much bigger conversation around universal design. There's so much actually beyond what the legal requirements are that I think that's sort of the, the, the area we were trying to talk about. Of course, there are sort of legal requirements for resources that's been a huge challenge for a lot of institutions and for a lot of educators. So, you know, hopefully some of the tools we've talked about today and some of the, some of the learnings we've had can help towards towards that but also push beyond it. And I think that's what we're trying to get at Jennifer in the chat so something that resonated with me the goalpost should continue moving as we improve. I think the work as an OER librarian of learning that getting into OER really makes you reevaluate your teaching. Yes, so important right like if, if you reach the goalpost and then stop, and you're done, you're probably doing something wrong. I think we've seen just in this open ed conference so far and I'm sure for the rest of the week like how much you know the goal court goalpost can be expanded and made more inclusive. I don't know if that makes sense. But there's always more boundaries to push that way. I will say though. This is this is not actually specific to open education but more broadly, just the idea of taking a moment to celebrate. When you do pass, you know, when you do make it through the goalposts. Of course there are there's more field after that we're getting very off of our sports ball metaphor. Because usually there isn't any field past the goalpost but you know of course there's so much room and direction that you can go past that but taking a moment also to celebrate wins is like the number one way to head off burnout and exhaustion so like to celebrate those small victories. This is not specific to open ed more organizing and this work in general, but something I think so important to name. Alyssa White says, what advice do you have for sharing the importance of culturally responsive teaching and the importance of centering accessibility I've felt resistance from faculty and other disciplines, as if they do not have the time or resource to prioritize this work. But one of the researchers for culturally responsive was just that it's just it's simply good teaching. I bet probably wouldn't be a very good answer for someone that was resistant but it's almost as though it's not that it requires prioritization it requires integration with the creation of resources so but it's the part of making your resources resonate with your students is them being able to to respond to them and see themselves in them and use them. I don't know what else I would add to that but yeah. Yeah, there's a great comment from Jennifer about don't, you know, using sort of academic freedom and ownership and pride in classroom don't outsource your teaching. Really good. The other thing I would say is, and this gets you know again into sort of the bigger organizing questions around this work. But there are different, you know, there are different sort of stakeholders and constituencies and people along that spectrum. You know, there are the folks who get it, who are ready to do this work. You know, they are. Yes, they just want resources and they want, you know, to have really good, you know, deep conversations and that sort of thing. And I think super important to offer programs and to have organizations in the space that facilitate those conversations. We also have a really big body in the middle who is amenable to this but is afraid, or, you know, unsure they are super confident they're worried about a lawsuit or they're worried about, you know, this proliferation of bills around the country. You know, we just saw some of the news out of Texas and other states around the country about that. And so we do also sort of message differently to the folks in that part of the spectrum then we do to the folks on the end here. And, you know, much more of that conversation is around understanding it sort of the initial exploration it's about evaluating not necessarily creating and being the first through the door. You know, there's just tons of movement that those folks can do as well. So it's just really important to sort of think about messaging differently and how you talk differently to different people along the spectrum. Thank you all for all of these awesome comments. I see tons of tons of stuff in the chat. Like I said, we are going to post these slides and all of these links in the sked so you can come back to it and reference it in the future. But thanks so much for joining and sharing as well in the chat. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you so much for a great presentation. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording.