Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice

Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice explores the opportunities and challenges of moving the discussion about open educational resources (OER) beyond affordability to address structural inequities found throughout academia and scholarly publishing. OER have the potential to celebrate research done by marginalized populations in the context of their own communities, to amplify the voices of those who have the knowledge but have been excluded from formal prestige networks, and to engage students as co-creators of learning content that is relevant and respectful of their cultural contexts.
 
Edited by academic librarians with experience advocating across campus, Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice takes a multidisciplinary approach and is filled with examples of the ways OER and open pedagogy can be used to support social justice in education. In five sections, it covers a wide range of topics from theoretical critiques to multidisciplinary examples of OER development in practice to examinations of institutional support for OER development.

• Section I: Theory and Problematizing
• Section II: Open Praxis
• Section III: Decolonizing Learning in the Global South
• Section IV: Scaling Up with Institutional Policies (Approaches)
• Section V: Building and Decolonizing OER Platforms 

Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice offers something for everyone who advocates for open pedagogy and OER across campus, from librarians to teaching faculty to centers for teaching and learning. It demonstrates ways that open pedagogy—and especially practices that encourage students to participate in building or localizing OER—can provide a way to incorporate a wider range of perspectives into original research projects and add these crucial perspectives into the scholarly discourse.
 
This book is also available as an open access edition at https://bit.ly/ACRLOERSJ.

CJ Ivory is an associate professor and librarian at the University of West Georgia where she teaches information literacy and research with a focus on social justice. She is also an advocate for open education on her campus and works with faculty across disciplines to support the implementation of open textbook alternatives. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Central Florida and MLIS from Florida State University. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, social justice education, and open pedagogy.
 
Angela Pashia has over a decade of experience as an academic librarian focusing on teaching critical information literacy, mentoring colleagues, working against structural oppression within libraries, and growing as a collaborative leader. Angela’s first co-edited book (with Jessica Critten), Critical Approaches to Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Courses, was selected as an ACRL Instruction Section, Teaching Methods Committee Selected Resource in 2020. Angela currently works as professor and head of the learning and research support department at Ingram Library, University of West Georgia, and is beginning to explore opportunities to support other scholars as a book and career coach.