We Can Decide What OER Are For | Marianne Madoré

"...I applied to the Spring 2021 Open Pedagogy fellowship, as an OER skeptic! The Fellowship provided a much-needed space for reflection and growth, bonding and hope. The fellowship foregrounded the relationship between open access, labor and social change. We learned about the profit margins of academic publishers and the genesis of CUNY Academic Works. We read Emily Drabinski’s article on critical librarianship and discussed the necessary articulation between open knowledge and the struggle against white supremacy and for better working conditions for librarians. From Dr. Sherry Deckman and PhD student Kristen Miller we learned how “open pedagogy” was intimately connected to the Black Radical Tradition’s practices of co-constructing knowledge and growing citational trees. Overall, I felt very inspired. Embracing what Conor Tomás Reed calls “the transformation of our university system into a veritable laboratory for different liberation strategies,” I started to re-think OER. Could students and faculty (and staff!) use open educational resources as yet another strategy for liberation? Certainly, we could decide what OER are for...."