 Hi, everyone. This presentation is going to be in English, and my name is Kelly Arispe, and I'm from Boise State University, and I'm completing a year-long sabbatical in Spain, so I don't have jet lag. It's really nice. I only had a short flight this time coming over to Europe. The title of my talk today is Partnering Higher Education in K-12 Institutions in OER, really looking at a sustainable model, what that might be, for engaging K-12 teachers in OER-enabled pedagogy. This is working earlier. That's okay. So the outline for my talk, this is a picture from Boise, so I'm in Idaho, and I'll show you where that is on the map if you're not familiar with the U.S. A lot of people in the U.S. are not familiar with Boise, so don't feel bad if not. The outline for my talk today is I'm going to go over the specific project briefly that we engage in with students. I'm a world languages teacher, and so I'll be talking to you briefly about that context. And then I'm going to talk to you about the conceptual and theoretical framework for how I'm working to bridge this gap between higher education and K-12 or secondary institutions. I'll be presenting specifically the model for how we bridge that gap, and then the question is really, is this a sustainable model? I'd invite you to give me feedback on that, and I also invite you to partner in some of the upcoming projects that we have specifically related to a grant that I'll be explaining in just a second. So this is a picture from pre-pandemic times when I was facilitating a K-12 and really K-16 workshop with world language teachers, and I'm going to show you a little bit about the work that we do, but first it's important to show you on the map where we are. So you can see here this is Idaho, we're in the northwest part of the U.S., and it's really important specifically in my context to explain that we're in a rural part of the U.S., and that fundamentally impacts the type of work that we're doing and the type of work we want to do to engage and include all of our community. Specifically, teachers that are in what are called frontier counties where there are seven people or less per square mile. So you can imagine people are very disconnected from centers where professional development is occurring. These are a couple pictures of Idaho. On the left here you can see it's very mountainous, beautiful, very wild, and then here on the right is where my institution is. We're in the middle of the urban metropolis of the state, and so out of 116 school districts, 102 of them are rural, and so this is the challenge, the problem, how do we connect teachers in rural districts so that they can engage in OEP. Back in 2018, I conducted, I'm going to go ahead and advance these, I conducted a needs assessment, and my role at the university is that I'm the methods professor, so I teach methods, pedagogy, for our pre-service teachers in addition to Spanish linguistics, and so I work a lot with our teachers, our pre-service teachers, and I do a lot of consulting with our in-service teachers. And what I was noticing from that needs assessment is that with every standards review, every time the standards evolve and change, teachers are left a little bit more apathetic, and they don't know how to norm to those standards. And at the same time, districts, the state at large, was discontinuing textbooks, and so teachers didn't know how to norm to the new standards or evolve their practice, and they didn't have resources to support that process. We also, in Idaho, which is a little bit different from many of the context I've been speaking a lot with you all here in the EU, is we have a local control ideology that dominates the way decisions are made systemically, especially when it comes to how professional development is operationalized, and that impacts the work and the way the work continues going forward. And so I was noticing that teachers were lacking resources. Mostly number one was time. It wasn't that they didn't want to do the work. They didn't know how or they didn't have the time to do that. And at the same time, there was this unevenness where pre-service teachers in higher ed were getting access to really, really timely professional development through coursework. And so they were being employed out into the field and that there was this big uneven gap in knowledge and ability. And so the question for me and the question for this work going forward and how I use OEP specifically is to address this problem. How exactly do teachers norm to new standards without resources? The Pathways Project is the response. The Pathways Project is basically a repository now full of ancillary materials. We went from 150 to now 838 renewable materials. And it's for all levels of K through 16 world language across nine different languages and cultures and for the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of language teaching and learning. And so this is our website here. I don't know if on the screen you can see, but this is the anatomy or this is what's entailed in every activity. One of the things that we try to do is we build the activities to follow a very unified template so that teachers know exactly what they're going to get with every activity and they can search according to key words that are coming up in their curriculum. We didn't want to create a textbook because we kept seeing that curricula continued to evolve and change. So instead we thought more about key concepts and ideas that continue to be taught and that they could easily search and find here. And what's really important is that every activity has a Google slides presentation, Canva, icons, images, video, everything there is editable, but it's already created for teachers. So if they don't have the time, they could just use it as is. But if they wanted to, of course, it's very easy for them to personalize the material. So we have both an OER Commons database and then we also just published three press books. We found that teachers really still like a textbook. They like going to one thing and finding what they need within that one thing. OER Commons is great because it really helps promote the revising and the remixing of the activities. But sometimes it also still acts as a barrier for teachers to access it because when they get on, you can imagine with 838 activities, it's difficult for them to search that database. So what we did this year is we tried to center and we prioritize the three languages that are most prominent in the state of Idaho, which are German, French and Spanish, and we have these chat books. So in my field, teachers struggle most with facilitating conversation centered around authentic tasks, task-based, performance-based activities. And so that's what these activities do. They meet that gap and specifically here in these press books, we help a German teacher who's teaching at the novice level very quickly find what he or she or they need in that text. And so this is new and we're very, very excited about how this will help leverage professional development opportunities going forward. In terms of conceptual theoretical framework, process is at the center and at the core of what we do and what we think of. I'm the researcher on the project. My co-director is the language lab resource director. And so she's staff and we work together to do all of this work. She supervises our undergraduate student team. I do a lot of the research and the training for our pre-service and in-service teachers. And so OEP and design-based research are at the heart of, again, our conceptual and theoretical frameworks. And so when you think about renewable assignments, this isn't new to anybody in the room. This is the four tests, right? The questions that we think about in terms of, are these activities truly renewable? And I've changed it here. Instead of students, our audience, the people that we are working with, of course, are teachers. But that encapsulates both pre- and in-service teachers, okay? So some of them are students, but most of them are in-service teachers. In terms of the research framework, I use DBR because it's iterative and so it's very helpful. We've passed through our exploratory and pilot phases and now I just received in December a national endowment for the humanities grant and so we're about to, we're, I'm prepping and we're about to embark on the first, the second cycle rather, or the third cycle of this research or already at the third cycle. After the pandemic, all of my timelines have been conflated. So in terms of the model, what I want to show you now is I want to transition a little bit about to how we use these teams and how we bridge this gap again between higher education and K through 12 and really work together. And I'm using this picture. So this is a picture from my university. I'm looking at my university here and you can see a bridge in the background and the bridge is symbolic. It's called the Friendship Bridge and this bridge was constructed precisely to bridge community outreach and engagement opportunities from the university to the community, but it was also intended for the community to be able to engage and to help the university understand ways to evolve and serve community needs. And so this is really at the heart of our model is working together. We're very community driven as you can tell from, from what I was talking about in terms of the problem that we're trying to solve. This is our model. Pre-service teachers are central to the ways that we're operationalizing this work. So they sit in the middle and they work on student teams. Our student teams entail OER editors, conversation assistants. So those are those content specific students who are helping in the language facilitate meaningful activities in our language lab. And then they work with those pre-service teachers. They design the activities. They work in tandem with faculty and staff. And then those pre-service teachers go out into the field. They work with in-service teachers and lead teachers. And I'll talk a little bit more about this in K through 12 schools. On the next slide it's two there. I intended for this this presentation to be to be accessed later. So I'm not going to take the time to read over all of this. But if you're interested in this model, what's really important here at the bottom is how it's funded. That always is a question that people ask us is how in the world that you've created, you've grown so quickly in you know, relatively a couple of years, how are you doing this work? Do you have lots of money? We just received a grant. The way that we were able to leverage this work was by using and helping students actually use their major, right? Even if they're not a language major, let's think of like a communications major or a computer science or a graphic design designer major, they can apply their skills and work in tandem with language students to build these activities. And that we've been able to fund through internship credit as well as work study. And so that's been really a successful model for us. So this gives you more information on on that process. What's most meaningful and I think, again, I'm not going to take the time to read all these quotes, but I think the thing that is really exciting for us is to see the value that it's provided to students. They get to see that their work truly is renewable. They're not just applying their knowledge there. I was the one who yesterday in the keynote asked the question about interdisciplinarity. This is a huge issue at my university. We're trying to find ways where we can help students see beyond their major or their class, but really start to interconnect all of their learning. And how do they showcase that through experiential learning? Internships are really key to that. And this is one project that helps embody those goals. And what these students say, even those that aren't just pre-service teachers, is that they can see that their work is going to a good cause. It's helping teachers leverage the type of classroom that they want to leverage is providing them with the activities that they need. And the pre-service teachers, what's really neat about it is that they work in tandem with in-service teachers who might not have the digital literacy, who might not know how to access the activity, but they are experts in implementation. And so they can share back with the pre-service teachers how to use the activity for a specific purpose. And so in that way it truly is collaborative. So the question is, and I'm going to try to honor the time I know we're a little bit, everyone's running a little bit late, is the question is, is this sustainable? So the Pathways Project has really grown, like I said, from 150 to about 830 activities, we've engaged over 119 undergraduate students. The teachers here, there's 21 K through 12 teachers and 12 higher ed teachers who are on the design team, not just the ones that are using the activities or remixing them, but ones that actually have been integral into the design process. And in terms of community engagement, you can see here we have a lot of subscribers. We produce a monthly newsletter just to help our community understand how we're engaging, how we're growing, what activities we've added, and we use that as a way to also provide access to digital literacy. Remember that so many of our teachers are in places that are remote, and so our newsletter allows us to have touch points that are important so that they know that we continue to care about their needs and we can communicate with them in a virtual way that's meaningful. So the NEH grant that we just received, we're really excited because it's going to allow us to grow in capacity, but specifically to use digital humanities materials. And this is where I need your help. I was really excited to come here and engage with you all because we're looking specifically for ways to remix all of these activities with digital content across the nine languages that we service. So we really want to train these teachers on how to make renewable assignments and how to look beyond the canonical or traditional types of materials that come in textbooks. The example that you just presented was perfect. I already sent it and shared it with my colleague to be able to grow the idea of what is French Francophone culture and to be able to showcase something from communities is exactly the type of project. We want to do that in the nine languages that we have in our repository. And so these are some of the products or deliverables that we're going to be engaging over or activities that we're going to be engaging in in the next year specifically. So in conclusion, professional development that is constructivist is at the heart of what we're doing. So we really believe that as teachers get in there and remix or even just use and revise an activity as they make it personal for their classroom, they'll understand and start to really embody those best practices that we're trying to help them norm to in light of the standards revisions. And then the impact for learning is really key. So do teachers who make their assignments publicly available demonstrate greater mastery of learning outcomes or show more enthusiasm for their work? That's the question we'll be evaluating among many others in the grant and the part that that we're most excited for. So rather than these renewable assignments just staying in higher education at Boise State University, they're supposed to be used in the greater K through 12 community, not just in Idaho, but hopefully globally. All right, that's it. These are my references. Thank you. I don't know if there's any time for questions or yeah. So my question is around standards alignment. So you said in Idaho that there's a lot of decision making made at the like extremely local levels. I assume that also includes K to 12 standards and competencies. So how do you ensure that the resources are aligned to the standards of the districts where they'll be used? And is there do you have some guidelines for the teachers around like consistency and updating them? Yeah, it's a great question. It's it's at the heart of really why this started. We have state standards that everyone in theory aligns to but in practice that doesn't happen. And so that is my area of expertise. I sit on the standard review board. I work with teachers. I help the state and I make sense of right. So I'm a participant in that and then we can then infuse that into the activities. But the activities also have national alignment to the standards as well as state alignment so that somebody outside of Idaho right can very easily look and see that national alignment. The next step is to have alignment global alignment. So we have the same common European framework that's very, very similar to our national American Council and teaching of foreign languages. So that's that's one of the next steps. But yeah, that's that's that's that is the place that we actually start. And so we have can do statements or actionable right steps for that help guide the how the materials are are created and those are infused in every every part of the activity. Yeah. Thanks so much for the presentation. Very interesting. And I'm curious to just have a sense of when we're talking about open pedagogy, we often then have to butt up with the idea of intellectual property. And I'm curious how you handle that because with the pre service teachers, that's a little different than with the in service teachers. And I see you nodding your head. So I'm I'm with you and I'm curious to hear your response. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm nodding my head because it's so much easier with the pre service teachers, the part of the class, they can take these two classes, learn a lot about it, do the internship, they understand it when they graduate. The problem is that professional development workshops are one off experiences. They're a day, they're two or three hours, and it's just not enough. And so part of the grant that we have, and what we're going to be exploring is, is this long term investment working with teachers on a more intense. So we're going to be actually working with eight rural and eight urban world language teachers in Idaho, they have a stipend, they're going to be completing modules, we're going to be talking to them about copyright issues, right, how how to actually make things open source, etc, etc. How does that does that impact their ability to then do this on their own independently? And so that that's the question, that's the research that's coming, hopefully. I don't know if you had a follow up question or comment. Yeah. Well, I was just going to say, I'd like to chat a little bit more after. And absolutely, because I didn't I didn't introduce myself. I'm Connie Blomgren there. Thank you. Yeah. You know, you know quite well, the challenges. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate it.