Author: Josie Gray

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[Theme music: “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org]

Josie Gray: Hello! Welcome to the open knowledge spectrums podcast, which explores questions of epistemic justice, or knowledge equity, in the context of open education and considers different possibilities for making open education and open educational practices more equitable.

My name is Josie Gray, and I am your host. This podcast is my final project for my Master of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

In this episode, I speak with three students in my Inclusive Design cohort: Jaime, Mitali, and Caleb, who I’ve had the privilege to work with and learn from over the last two years. They graciously volunteered to record an episode with me to talk about from their perspectives as students and inclusive designers. We talk about their master’s major research projects (MRPs), we reflect on positive and challenging learning experiences, and discuss how education could be more inclusive.

Jaime Hilditch is a second-year student in the Master of Inclusive Design program at OCAD University. She has a background in graphic and communication design from Kingston University and OCAD University. Jaime is passionate about social design and inclusive and open education. Her most recent work looks at introducing braille concepts and emphasizes pre-braille learning in kindergarten classrooms.

Mitali Kamat is an inclusive designer and occupational therapist who is passionate about building inclusive environments and products with and for individuals with disabilities. She has been working in public schools in the United States for 7 years. Her key interest areas are assistive technologies, inclusive product design, and built environments. Design for her is multidisciplinary, it is the process of collaborating with individuals from different fields of expertise and lived experiences that make her work life most meaningful.

Caleb Valorozo-Jones is an Inclusive Designer, food allergy “foodie,” and accidental rubber duck collector. A lifelong misfit and edge case, Caleb’s design ethos focuses on increasing representation of minorities and oppressed groups in policy and design processes, especially his fellow neurodivergent and 2SLGBTQA+ community members. His current passion is researching Dungeons & Dragons for and with neurodivergent adults to help build self-autonomy and self-advocacy skills, as well as creating cathartic experiences. Ultimately, Caleb aims to carve out a space for his fellow misfits through design.

And with that, let’s switch over to the conversation.

Josie:  Hello, to begin, would you each introduce yourself and give listeners a bit of background about who you are, your educational background, and what brought you to inclusive design, and what your MRP is?

Jaime Hilditch:  My name is Jaime Hilditch. I’m a designer and author of a children’s book called The Earth Needs a Break from Plastic. I have a background in graphic design and communication design. And all the design work I did, when possible, served companies, people, organizations wanting to do good. So for example, branding for Fashion Revolution in Calgary, Alberta, graphics for an environmental company working to serve Henvey Inlet First Nations, and exploring dangers of plastic pollution. And I realized through inclusive design, I had an interest in early education as well as design. So my major research project is titled “Pre-braille implementation into early education,” more specifically in the kindergarten classroom. And we’re working to introduce pre-Braille. And pre-Braille is activities done before learning the formal Braille writing system—so Braille grades one and two. The activities work to build two-handed coordination, finger sensitivity, grasp and release, light touch, finger dexterity and mobility, which are all important to formal learning of Braille. And it’s my hope that with this project, introducing these pre-Braille exercises and activities, students will be more engaged in the Braille writing system if they need to later on learn Braille, there will be more inclusive lessons conducted in the classroom, and starting it at a younger age.

Josie:  What brought you to the inclusive design program?

Jaime:  So, I was in graphic design at OCAD, and I heard about this program through my professor during my undergrad thesis. And I was working on a project, which was the book I ended up writing and illustrating. And she thought I should, you know, attend one of the sessions, and I did. And you know, being really interested in social design, I thought this was another area that could broaden my design perspective. I think, you know, learning design was very helpful—graphic design—but I was more interested in how it could be accessed by what wider audience. You know, web accessibility and more inclusive education. Yeah.

Josie:  Mitali, how about for yourself?

Mitali Kamat: I’m going to give you the short version, because the long version is really long. But um, I’ve been an occupational therapist for a while now. So I’ve been practicing about seven years now. And I’ve tried to sort of… you know how you’re in, you’re practicing in a field, and you’re trying to find what you want to do, or like your niche in that field. So what ended up happening was, I was on that discovery, and I landed in a school, which was heavy on assistive tech—so I’m a school-based occupational therapist, and that’s what I do—and because of the caseload I had in the school, I had to learn a lot more about assistive technology; I ended up getting certified. And there was this 3D printer at the school, or in my department, which was not being used. And we also had this incredible tool guy—or a carpenter—who would sort of customize devices for therapists. So it was like therapists basically engaging in design without actually knowing that they’re doing it. And I started doing like adaptive 3D-printed aids for my students because they had unique preferences, like they wanted to use one type of water bottle that would fit on their wheelchair. And there was not a cut, like, you know, something that was off the shelf that was out there. So we ended up designing an adaptive aid for her, for her wheelchair. So things like that.

And I realized that I enjoy that process of actually working with someone to design an adaptive aid or assistive tech device. And that’s when I started reading about it. And I started connecting with organizations, and I came across the book Design Meets Disability. And I read it. And I was like, “Yes! This is… this is what I’d like to do.” Finally, after, like, 10 years of trying, or something. But yeah, then I started basically just googling what inclusive designers is, and I came across this program, since, you know, there’s not a whole lot of them out there. Yeah, that’s how I ended up in the field.

Josie:  Thanks. And do you want to share a little bit about what your MRP is?

Mitali: Yeah. So my major research project, I’m working with blind and partially sighted participants who have an art and design background or who are in the arts, to come up with tools and strategies that could reimagine what drawing looks like for blind, and maybe come up with a drawing toolkit that will help them create, help them access education programs and even industry.

Josie:  Cool. Thanks. And Caleb?

Caleb Valorozo-Jones:  So I have a bit of a weird background. So I have a certificate and diploma in music production and business. And through doing a lot of like music production and marketing, like on an indie level, I started building websites, and I was designing stuff for people because I knew how to use Photoshop—which was all that you need to know at the time on the local level—and got more and more into it, and learned about interaction design as a field so then I got a degree in interaction design. And now I’m doing a master’s of inclusive design at OCAD. So kind of like a weird transition from like doing music and like pop culture-based things to more design and service design.

Josie:  And what was it about the inclusive design program that really appealed to you?

Caleb:  That’s like, complicated because like, I think I’ve always to a degree been passionate about inclusive design. Although it wasn’t like called that when I was younger. And like design education, especially like in high school to when—because like, I went back to school as a mature student—like the degree did not exist when I had graduated high school. And when we took design in high school, it was communications class, and you had to do certain things that— It was primarily graphic-design based, and like—no offense to Jaime—that’s just not what… I’m just not into it the same way. Like I like to digital design and like multimedia design. And you had to take art, and I was terrible at art classes, and I wasn’t into it. So we didn’t really have the vocabulary to understand that like how things are designed or industrial design, or like all these things that can encapsulate inclusive design. But it was largely because like, my sibling is autistic. And he has other learning disabilities, and they required a lot of assistive technology and accommodations going through schools, and what they have IEPs in Ontario. And it was such a battle to just do the simplest things, like a computer with like assistive technology, so that they could participate in school. And my family was kind of like always embroiled in these battles about it and seeing the same thing, like my mom is also dyslexic and has ADHD. And like, there’s whole complexities around the education system that like… like now I identify as neurodivergent, as well, but didn’t have those same access needs or barriers to be a “problem” student. And so I was always kind of like, very aware of the lack of access and inclusivity for certain people, because we make exceptions and inclusions and access needs or exceptions for people all the time. But we just don’t consider it that if it’s not above and beyond what we want to do. So I became very aware of that. So when I was doing my interaction design degree, they always talked about, “You have to make it accessible. And it’s easier to make it accessible before, than after, the fact. And it’s cheaper,” which is like always how things are framed in education, because it’s capitalism. But we didn’t really like go beyond how to do that beyond like WCAG. And like, I was like, well I want to know more. And because I was kind of passionate, especially about like neurodivergent and autistic accessibility and the getting involved and following people on Twitter in those communities, you eventually find out about the IDRC and learn about those projects. And they were so cool and finding out about how it’s linked to the program.

Josie:  And you want to share a little bit about what your MRP is.

Caleb:  Yeah, so my MRP is Dungeons and Dragons for neurodivergent adults. So a lot of neuro-diverse programming—or program for neuro-diverse populations— focus on having them change their behaviors to fit more into society. And there’s specific therapies that are very harmful and can cause a lot of psychological damage and PTSD. So this is looking at, instead of asking neurodivergent people to change themselves or come from a deficit-based approach, using hobbies or activities that use a lot of role play and imagination and creative opportunities to imagine and construct neuro-diverse spaces that are a) safe spaces for neurodivergent people, but also to have them work and build on the skills that they identify as needing, so like, self-advocacy, self-determination, etc, which all happens in Dungeons & Dragons, but unless you’ve played you might not know that. But it’s, that as alternative. And also helping neuro-diverse people who may not have access to support systems or funding for accessing programming. So it’s like, a more inclusive, hobby-based, less expensive way to do it.

Josie:  Yeah. So one of the questions I’m exploring through the podcast is this idea of openness. And how people think about openness, and how people understand openness. And I was wondering how you three have experienced openness in education? And that could be in kind of, whatever way that word makes sense to you.

Jaime:  So for me, before I went to OCAD, I did a diploma in art and design at Kingston University. And so it was a one-year program, and the first six months you’re encouraged to explore. So we tested out fashion, 3D animation, fine art. A lot of those I realized I was not good at all. I remember creating a fashion piece with one arm hole.. but actually, sort of inclusive because then I was like, well, you know, this could be for someone who is pregnant, or it could be for someone who has hurt their arm. Anyway. So we did have briefs, as most design projects do, but there was always room to go speak to people in the community—which would inform our designs—guerrilla marketing and campaigns, and collaborating with one another. So we did eventually—after the Christmas break, so halfway through—we focused on one of those areas, and I chose the communication design. But we were still able to work on projects with people in fashion, and people in, you know, 3D modeling and stuff. So I think those, you know, learning from people in different areas was very beneficial and just really interesting.

Josie:  Yeah, for sure.

Mitali: I don’t remember a whole lot of openness, honestly. I think the only times I can remember are like when we had sort of, project-based activities. So I remember when I was in undergrad, there was this one, one time, that we had to do like… audio-visual presentation. And I ended up, with my friends, making a movie out of interviews from these people who are working in a school with children with disabilities back in India. And I was completely out of the context of what our curriculum was. Yeah, I think I didn’t have a whole lot of opportunities for openness in my programs until I got to OCAD, I guess. And getting— the only things I remember being, like flexibility and like, the creativity to go out and explore and do whatever makes sense to you out of this school or this learning goal was probably everything that was project based, I would say.

Josie:  Mhmm. The videos you describe, so you were— was that in the States?

Mitali: That was not in the States. I was in India, in Mumbai. And I was at a point where I was getting frustrated with the curriculum, and I really wanted some real world, like, experience. So we ended up going to this school. And they had, you know, a lot of children with multiple disabilities and Down syndrome. And in India, you don’t have the education system that’s like, sort of funded by the government. So you don’t have like IEPs, and all of that. So you have these schools, which are special-education schools, which support students. So we went to that particular school, and it was my first sort of… exposure into real-world application of students in a school environment with regards to OT. So, yeah.

Josie:  Yeah, I think that’s a great example of just like, how making learning more “real world” can be so much more impactful and motivating and feel like it’s worth the time. How about you, Caleb?

Caleb:  In terms of, like open education resources, I think, not a lot of exposure to that stuff. With having taken like design fields and stuff—and I don’t know if Jaime had a similar experience—but because there is a lot more informal or like, grey literature, about design.. Like there’s like oodles of blogs and Medium posts. And most companies now post their, like, design systems, so that you can understand how they develop them. And, and like Microsoft’s Inclusive Design package, I forget what they call it—

Josie:  Toolkit, I think.

Caleb:  Yeah, their toolkit. So there’s a lot of resources in that sense, that we have access to in learning, and that they were free and were referenced. Because they are like industry examples and case studies and resources, so they’re useful in that regard. But like Mitali said, I— my instinct is to say there was not a lot of openness in education, but like, the more I think about it… And in my interaction design projects and the briefs, like yes, we had to do specific things to learn specific hard and soft skills, but we could do whatever we wanted with the project, usually within approval of the professor.. Like I still— [laughs]. No, I shouldn’t tell that story, [laughter] but like, if they didn’t think it was a good idea, you wouldn’t do it because you, you’d get a bad grade. And ultimately, even if it was the most fulfilling project for you, your scholarships and funding and bursaries are ultimately based on your grades. So you’re not going to do that in pursuit of it, unless maybe you have better like, ethics than I do to like not compromise your principles… [Laughter] But to me, I was like, yeah, well, I’m not going to lose my funding.

Josie:  Mhmm. Yeah, that the topic of grades in that context is so tricky, and I feel like it’s one we’ve had in practice with this cohort in the last year, right? Like how grades are so limiting, but also how they still have a lot of power over the type of work that we do. And like, as long as there are grades, we can’t not consider grades. I follow a lot of people on Twitter that talk about “un-grading” and changing— Like they still have to submit grades, but they change their grading practices. So it’s more about… Like, they’re not grading the work, they’re more grading how students reflect on their own learning over the semester. And like, that’s the grade. There’s a lot more collaboration between instructor and student, and a lot more self-reflection and self-grading. So yeah, those conversations are very interesting. And, when you want to… when you want to give students the ability to like, explore and do things maybe outside of what’s expected, stepping back from grading is pretty important, just because they’re so limiting, and they’re so oppressive.

Caleb:  And I love those systems, but also like, the thought of that sends me into like a panic spiral because it’s like, we’ve learned nothing else other than to achieve the grade.

Mitali: It does make you happy also. It’s like—

Josie: Yeah!

Mitali: It doesn’t mean anything! [Laughter] Like it really doesn’t

Caleb:  Yeah. Because I also hate it when professors are like, why are you so obsessed with grades? And it’s like, because…

Jaime:  We’re made this way?

Josie:  Grades got me scholarships.

[Laughter]

Caleb:  Yeah, like, how do you think I am here? If my grade drops, so does the money…

Josie:  In past educational experiences, what are sometimes you have felt included, or excluded, or otherwise? Like, what kind of challenges have you faced in the education system.

Mitali: I feel like my largest barrier or challenge, has been being on a Visa… [Laughs] I didn’t realize how much that limits your options, like even in my master’s program for occupational therapy. You know, all of these students had the chance to go and explore an externship. You know, they went to Ghana, and they went to, I think multiple other places where they got to explore. And, because of money and because of Visa and because of all of these things, that was just not an option for me. I mean, the process was so different from back at home that the time it took to sort of navigate and understand what kind of environment I was in, I was pretty much out of school by then. So you know, you just kind of follow this traditional path that, you know, most people have taken before you. And it’s safe, and you know, you’re going to graduate and get a job at the end of it. Yeah… Not a whole lot of room for exploration, even at OCAD. OCAD, though, I did try to like— I had the chance to sort of edit my program to my needs. But it took a lot of, sort of, reaching out myself and trying to see what I can get replaced with, you know, what I needed to do.

Josie:  Yeah, you did a lot of self-advocacy work.

Mitali: Yeah, like, this is my second master’s. So I was like, I don’t want to get through another program and be like, I’m not happy with what I learned, you know. So I did replace a lot of things with more experiential learning, like an internship, an independent study project. Anything that’s a project for me, I found was like, a good place to learn. [Caleb: Yeah] Something that was not an assignment or like, like a graded assignment or something like that. Yeah, I think that has been my biggest challenge or barrier, I would say, is navigating the international aspect and trying to find scholarships, and trying to find classes I can take, and stuff like that.

Josie:  Mhmm. Yeah, I think that challenge of being an international student, for sure. I think you faced a lot of barriers with that. And it’s interesting that OCAD—or at least the inclusive design program—isn’t better equipped to deal with those barriers, considering it’s a program that aims to be welcoming of international students and to build more global communities.

Caleb:  I wonder how much… well a) that will change. And I just find it interesting too like, with Mitali doing all this self-advocacy to get all these experiential and like more custom and well suited to your learning goals. And why like, we kind of talked about this prior, like, in class when you’re discussing about like electives and like, wanting to learn and trying to take electives at other schools, and the whole system kind of seems like you can do this, but they don’t really want you to.

[Laughter]

Mitali: It’s true.

Jaime: Yeah.

Caleb: It’s not exclusive to OCAD. That’s just, I’ve noticed that other schools. Like even when I was trying to take electives in my undergrad and wanting to take them at a different school, because it was something I was interested in learning, and it was just like, such a headache.

Josie:  Mhmm. Yeah. Jutta has talked about doing co-design sessions to see how we can improve the inclusive design program. And it would be interesting to see—it sounds like it used to be—but interesting to see how the inclusive design program could be more flexible and easier to personalize it to specific learning goals. Like I think those barriers are things that could be made… less

Jaime:  For sure.

Mitali: It was interesting when she said that like, because it does make sense. Like, you know, it’s kind of like an individualized education program, or like plan. Which would be like, a perfect fit for an inclusive design program, right? You are basically using something that has been used for students who need that, to see if it works better for everyone else? And that makes sense. Yeah, I think it would be really nice if they can do that.

Josie:  Yeah, Caleb or Jaime, do you have experiences or challenges you’d like to share?

Caleb:  I have, like, two thoughts about it. And like, my first thought is always—not always—but like my first thought is kind of experiencing the education system as a queer person, as a queer man. And that’s always been a concern, like— It’s less so in post-secondary a concern because like, it’s impolite, especially in Canadian society to be like, outwardly homophobic. But that doesn’t mean like you don’t experience microaggressions. I know everyone experiences microaggressions for various things. But like, I have definitely had those moments in education. And I think like with any person who’s experiencing microaggressions, or oppression, or being marginalized in the classroom, that is going to take away from your experience. And you’re not focusing on learning, you’re more focused on your safety. And I’m sure that has been experienced by lots of people, having sexist or racist or xenophobic professors. Like, I’ve not met anyone who has not had that experience. And I know schools have policies to deal with these situations. But I think the reality for students is much different. And as much as— I feel like students are told a lot like, “Oh, well, you’re buying this education, like you’re the customer. It’s catered to you.” But there’s not that— There’s such a huge power imbalance that even making complaints or advocating for yourself, it very much does feel like you’re putting yourself at risk. And you’re risking your grades, which depend— Like it all, it all ties into, like the system where you feel excluded and also like, could hurt your academic or your professional career if once you graduate that you’re a “problem” person.

And then I think a lot about, in my undergrad, when I was sick, and I had to have surgery, and I was on, like, accessibility, the Student Accessibility office. But it was a nightmare to deal with, and like to deal with teachers, and systems that like we’re not doing what they were meant to do. And just being a person with temporary accessibility needs. The hurdle for people who are not able bodied, or disabled, or sick, or experience chronic illness, I like, I can’t imagine having to go through schooling or post-secondary schooling with that. That’s, to me, like one of the biggest problems with exclusion—in society in general—but specifically education where they… they say they have these policies, but it’s still so difficult for the students themselves to enact them.

Josie:  Yeah. Post-secondary is very ableist and not designed to support disabled people at all. And I think with COVID, we’ve seen a lot of like disabled people who’ve been asking for accommodations to be able to take their classes remotely and being told for a long time that that wasn’t possible. And now all of a sudden, oh, all of a sudden, it’s possible. And will those accommodations still be… Will those be provided now as accommodations? Especially for people who are immune compromised and chronically ill, where it’s still a huge risk for them to go back in person, even once people start to get vaccinated. Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot about the different kind of accommodation requirements that have come up with COVID, and around like, people not having quiet places to work or take tests because they’re at home and not having their own space, and with this online proctoring and how ableist those systems are and how racist those systems are. Yeah, academia is not a safe place for a lot of people.

Caleb:  Did you see the thing about the York student in Myanmar?

Josie:  Yeah, the email.

Caleb: Yeah.

Jaime:  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Caleb:  It was—I don’t know if you saw it, Mitali—but it was a student who’s in Myanmar, who’s going through a military coup. He asked to reschedule his midterm because they were shutting down all the internet, the cell. And the teacher was like, incredibly rude and dismissive and questioned his sense of reality…

Mitali: Oh my god.

Caleb: And said, like, “Well, you better pass the exam, it’s going to be difficult.”

Mitali: [Laughs] Sorry. This is not like, laughter…

Caleb:  No, it’s… incredulity. And that people were so shocked. I’m like, no, like, this is so exemplary of a lot of the mindsets. A school may have a policy, but that professor is a barrier to enacting that policy.

Josie: Mhmm.

Mitali: Yeah.

Jaime:  Kinda reminds me of a classmate of ours talking about being like a half a semester behind because their accessibility was delayed, and like he couldn’t get the transcripts.

Josie:  Yeah, accommodations not being the default, and having to go through all these hoops to get those required accommodations.

Jaime:  And then having to catch up while you’re doing a giant project. And I think similar to Caleb, less so in post-secondary, but in high school and younger. I am a person of quiet nature, and I also have anxiety. So many times, but depending on the class or the project structure, I wasn’t able or didn’t feel comfortable contributing. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge the different learning styles, and mental health, and language barriers, and you know, to create a safe and inclusive space to learn. I did have some teachers in high school that would try and make these accommodations. But I was definitely extra work on my part to go and speak to them, even if I wasn’t comfortable doing that on my own and advocating for what I needed. But in terms of inclusion, I think this year in class with Jutta, definitely co-designing a class outline was something I’d never experienced before. I think that was really exciting.

Caleb:  That just made me think, Jaime, basically, like what we’re kind of discussing is that at all— It puts the onus and the effort on the student. But I had a great professor. I only had her for like two classes, she was one of my favorite professors. But at the start of her class, she would do a survey so that we didn’t have to, like, speak up in class. Because a lot of times teachers say, “Who has accessibility accommodations?” and you have to put your hand up, and you’d be singling yourself out, and people who wouldn’t want to do that. And she said, “Regardless of whether you’re registered with the accessibility office, do you have any accessibility needs? Do you have any concerns?” And it would be in the survey, and like it also said, like, “What’s your preferred name? What are your pronouns? What accessibility needs? Are there any concerns that you have about this class?” And like, yeah, the onus is on the student, but you don’t have to, like, go initiate that conversation or out yourself in any capacity. She was initiating, and she was laying the groundwork for setting up that dialogue.

Jaime:  That’s great. I wish I had that.

Josie:  How do you think inclusive design practices can make education better?

Jaime: So many things. I think, you know, we all talked about this a little bit, but tailoring studies to unique interests. Kind of creating your own your own degree, your own study path. As well as something that includes cross disciplines and collaboration, combining different faculties. So like, even science and fine art. You know, having these conversations that would not typically happen. I think that’s one thing.

Josie:  For sure.

Mitali: Yeah, definitely. I think it would help to have the intersections, right. I mean, the more that we get to… sort of interact with students or professors from different fields and different backgrounds. And I think it depends on what level of education we’re talking about, as well. Like, I feel like once you’re at a graduation and post-graduation level, you would assume that you a little bit know where you’re going. Whereas it would be harder to identify goals for someone who is very, very young. You have to, you know, come up with a lot of creative methods to do that. Yeah, I think tailoring a program according to your goal—like overarching goal—would be ideal, according to me. Like, so my goal at the end of this is I want to work on this one project, or I want to be able to learn how to do this. And whatever skills I need to get there, hopefully, the university or the program can equip me with those tools or those resources to get to my end point.

Josie:  Mhmm.

Jaime:  I also think it’d be interesting to look at post-secondary education models in Europe, ones that are free to attend. You know, cost is a big barrier for education post high school. I don’t know the school specifically or how they operated, you know, I have to look into that more. And I also think we’ve touched a bit on this in class, these schools in Europe are maybe more tailored studies, and they’re free to attend.

Josie:  Yeah, cost is a huge barrier, right.

Caleb:  Cost definitely. And I also think, like, the thing that I love most about open education and open education resources—and obviously I’m not the resident expert here, that’s Josie [laughter]—but just kind of the sharing of knowledge, in a sense that knowledge does not have to exist or be captured in one way. Like I was reading a survey and report of graduate students and professors, and the majority of them have at least one parent who has a PhD. And there’s like insights into the education system and participating in post-secondary education that you’re not going to have in terms of its culture, and also the understanding of its materials and the way it works, that if you don’t have that knowledge, like I don’t have that knowledge, my parents don’t have post-grad degrees. We always talk about the accessibility of journal articles and learning materials in terms of their accessibility for disability and needs, but also, the concept of plain language and understanding knowledge. I think that’s like the biggest opportunity for open education resources is just giving more people access to knowledge that is not paywalled and is also at different levels of knowledge scaffolding. Because journal articles can be like so, so painful when you want to learn about topic or get into it. And a lot of the time, it’s easier to read and start at these, like, simplified blog posts. But like, there’s somewhere in the middle that you can meet with open education and making it more inclusive in the sense that getting more people into different topics.

Josie:  I think you’ve made great points, both talking about like for first generation students, post-secondary is like such a system in that it’s like, you have to learn how to navigate it and how it’s structured, and who to talk to, and like what kind of supports are available that, like if you don’t have those support networks that can help guide you through that, that’s a huge barrier for students who are first generation. And talking about paywalled articles and more access to information, but also more like public facing scholarship, where the goal is to make knowledge more accessible in all of those different ways. Like not behind a paywall, written in plain language, actually relevant to people outside of academia, digitally accessible, like can be worked with assistive technologies, those are all part of it.

Jaime:  But a lot of times during the early part of the project and literature review, finding these journal articles, and be really excited about them, and then just… just not comprehending because it’s such scientific— Yeah, I guess… I don’t know the type of language. But it’s quite difficult to understand, and you have to, you know, review multiple times. And so, I’m trying with my MRP to make it very plain language, also something I’m comfortable with writing as well.

Josie:  Yeah, it’s such a skill, right? Like you get people who do academic writing all the time. And they have such a hard time writing in plain language. Like it’s… both of those things are skills.

Caleb:  Because I think it’s shown itself to be a very large problem. Like, with dissemination of information and knowledge surrounding COVID. And people’s understanding of how it works and the dangers it poses, because so much of it is written in academic language and scientific language and then disseminated through journalists who are trying to—and like, I know there’s science journalists and whatnot—but I think that’s perhaps one of the problems with it. And like trying to explain to my family about like, “Well, they’re saying a different thing every day. It’s changing. They keep saying different things.” I’m like, “You’re watching like, science and academia happened in real time, like, probably for the first time in your life.” We’re not used to that, like as a society, like we don’t have… it’s a completely different world.

Josie:  Yeah. It’s so interesting to see the new ways people are sharing information. Like I’ve seen so many great TikTok videos explaining how vaccines work that are hilarious but also make so much sense.

[Laughter]

[Theme music]

Josie: If you want to connect with any of the guests today, you can connect with each of them on LinkedIn by searching their names. So you can search for Mitali Kamat, Jaime Hilditch, and Caleb Valorozo-Jones. You can also find Caleb on Twitter @qrnrd and check out his website at https://calebvalorozojones.ca/. You can also checkout Jaime’s website at https://jaimehilditch.com/, where you can learn more about her children’s book.

You can learn more about this podcast at knowledgespectrums.opened.ca. On the website, you can find all episodes and transcripts, along with many other resources and information related to this project.

You can connect with me on Twitter @josiea_g and you can tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #OKSPodcast

I record this podcast on the traditional and unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, and the territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples.

The theme song is “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

This episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. So you are welcome to share and remix this episode, as long as you give credit, provide a link back to the original source, and share any remixed work under the same license.

This has been Open Knowledge Spectrums. Thank you for listening.

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• Collaborative and Open Publishing Models Transcript [PDF]
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[Theme music: “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org] 

Josie Gray: Hello! Welcome to the Open Knowledge Spectrums podcast, which explores questions of epistemic justice, or knowledge equity, in the context of open education and considers different possibilities for making open education and open educational practices more equitable. 

My name is Josie Gray, and I am your host. This podcast is my final project for my Masters of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University. 

In this episode, I speak with Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde about how collaborative, open models for publishing open educational resources can support more equitable and transparent publishing workflows. We also discuss the power of publishing and the importance of ensuring that that power is distributed and accessible.  

Apurva Ashok is the project lead for the Rebus Community. She helps educational institutions build human capacity in OER publishing through professional development offerings, such as the Textbook Success Program. Apurva has studied literature and marketing at McGill University and completed the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University. Her experience ranges across academic publishing, media, social justice, and volunteerism. In 2020, Apurva received an Open Educational Award for Excellence, in recognition of her contributions to the field. She strongly believes in translating knowledge among communities and regions and in the value of greater critical thinking for all. 

Zoe Wake Hyde worked in media research and academia in New Zealand before completing the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University. Having been somewhat radicalized by discovering the faults of traditional academic publishing, she is now focused on creating systems that support better, more equitable access to knowledge and learning. She is currently the project lead for Rebus Ink, a project exploring better ways to support researchers’ workflows and connect them with the open ecosystem.  

And with that, let’s hear from Apurva and Zoe. Hope you enjoy. 

[Theme Music] 

Josie: To start would you each introduce yourself and say your name so that people can differentiate your voices.  

Apurva Ashok: Hi, everyone. My name is Apurva Ashok. I am originally from Bangalore, India, but I’m currently based in Toronto, Canada. I want to mention I am located on the traditional territories of many nations, including the Mississauga of the Credit, the Anishinabek, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Peoples. And I want to acknowledge them and thank them for the privilege to live, work, and play here. And for allowing all of us to have a conversation today.  

Zoe Wake Hyde: Hi, everyone. My name is Zoe Wake Hyde. I am from New Zealand originally. And realizing now I should have looked up my land acknowledgment for being based in Montreal currently. And certainly, I can tell you that I’m from the Waikato region in New Zealand and was immensely fortunate to grow up on the land of the Tainui and I can’t think of anything else to say there. [Laughs.] 

Zoe: Okay. So, clearly I was not prepared for this on the day, and I can’t do a land acknowledgement off the top of my head… yet. But it’s important, so I asked Josie if I could record one after the fact, still owning up to the fact that I got it wrong the first time around, but giving it the time and space it deserves. With that in mind, I want to acknowledge that on the day of the original recording and today, I am located in Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montreal, which is found on the unceded territories of the Haudenosaunee and Kanienʼkehá꞉ka First Nations. It is a place where I am immensely grateful to live and work. Now, my understanding of a land acknowledgement is that it is an opportunity for me to speak to and reflect on my relationship to the land I find myself on, but as an immigrant and a settler, I also feel strongly that I want to acknowledge the land I come from, to which I still have a really deep connection. So with that, I also acknowledge and extend my respect and gratitude to the Tainui iwi, who are the tangata whenua, or people of the land of the Waikato, my home in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Thank you for the chance to get this right. Lesson learned. And now, on with the show. 

Josie: Could you both maybe give a bit of background about your professional background?  

Apurva: Zoe, why don’t you go ahead this time? 

Zoe: [Laughs] Okay, absolutely. So, I took a long, winding path to where I am now, that from this perspective looks like it makes a lot of sense. So, since my undergrad back in New Zealand, I have worked in various roles related to higher education. So, I was a media researcher for a while, so I was analyzing media coverage of universities. I then worked in administration in a university as well, and ended up finding a real interest in academic publishing and set out to, you know, pursue the nice wood–paneled office in some cushy university press job, which I thought existed. And in doing my Masters of Publishing discovered that open research is really the place that I want to be. And I’m really interested in open monographs in particular, and then through that program ended up working in open education with the Rebus Foundation and Pressbooks. And so that was about.. close to five years ago now, and I’ve been very happily exploring the open space through a few different channels, up until today. 

Josie: Thanks. Apurva? 

Apurva: I have a similar background to Zoe’s. I’ve also side-stepped from academia to publishing to open publishing. I have a background in English literature. I also completed the Master of Publishing program that Zoe just mentioned. And I’ve been working in open education for about four years now. I learnt a lot about commercial publishing during my master’s degree. I was introduced, thanks to wonderful faculty in that program, to ideas around open pedagogy, open tools, open processes, and landed an internship at Rebus, where I now work. So, got into the field as an intern, worked hands–on with open publishing projects, and have stayed in the field ever since and continue to be more and more amazed by all the potential it has to change systems and education to make it more equitable and to really act more as a service than as an industry.  

Josie: Right, absolutely. So, both of you got into open education through that publishing program, is that right? 

Apurva: Mhmm. 

Zoe: Yep. 

Josie: Oh cool. I didn’t quite realize that. I knew you had both done that publishing program, but I didn’t realize that was directly your tie to open education. 

Zoe: It’s a great funnel. [Laughter] We try to bring as many through as we can. There have been others, too, from that program who we’ve worked with in open ed.  

Josie: This wasn’t a question I had on the list, but something I thought about after. I was kind of wondering with your – both of your – backgrounds, both of your educations in publishing, I was wondering like what part of that education did you find useful as you kind of transitioned into more open education? And where did you have to kind of imagine differently? 

Apurva: I think for me, one of the most useful pieces was just really understanding the ins and outs of what it takes to make a book. I think so much of the labour that goes into the work tends to happen behind a curtain. You sort of hand someone a manuscript if you’re an academic and then *bam* out comes a book in many different formats and forms. So, the program really broke down the various stages of the process, and the number of different hands that are involved into making this work. So, with open education, the shift for me was sort of seeing how this could work in maybe a non-profit sense, in a non-commercial sense, and finding ways to again match how pieces of the trade publishing world could map out differently in an open publishing context. 

Zoe: Yeah, I really echo that. So much happens behind the curtain. And there’s real power in it. And that’s another thing I took away from my time in MPub was understanding the power of publishing. It is an incredibly important industry, cultural phenomenon… the technologies involved. It’s pretty immense in terms of its impact on how we live our lives when you think of publishing as making anything public, right. You can use quite an expansive definition. And so, the combination of understanding its power and understanding how it can be done so that you can then translate those to the wider world outside of the publishing industry, that there is power in the process of publishing, that should be owned by everybody, that should be accessible to everybody. That’s really one of the things I’ve brought through into my work in open education, is that this is something that anybody can do. We all do it all the time in different ways. So how can we then support and structure that a little bit so that publishing can be done by people who want to have that impact on the world? 

Josie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was really looking forward to talking with you both because you have that background in publishing, which I am extremely jealous of. I feel like in my own work, I’m kind of trying to do publishing and not really sure of what I’m doing, but…[laughs] 

Apurva: And I’ll hold on to what Zoe said where you’ve probably been doing it all along without necessarily calling it publishing. I know you’ve contributed chapters as part of your masters cohort to a book that you’ve published on Pressbooks and were using that term officially, and that counts as part of the work. Producing a series like this one counts as part of the work. 

Josie: [Laughs] Right, yeah. 

Zoe: Absolutely. Yeah, it has really felt like we’re in this space in between a lot of different things, and that by trying to do the work of publishing in a way that isn’t about us creating the content and publishing the books, but supporting everybody to do publishing, there are so many spaces where I feel on the edges. And Apurva, I’m curious if you feel this too. You know, when I’m in the open access space, I am a publisher, but not. When I’m in the open education space, I’m not a publisher, but I am. And when I’m around other publishers, I’m something else entirely different from them again. It’s a really exciting and interesting space, but it does kind of get at that – yeah there’s a bit of – kind of mystery to where we fit in all of it, because publishing has traditionally been so structured, so centred in the industry. And then people on the, you know, outside of that walled garden haven’t seen themselves in it, haven’t seen themselves as part of publishing. They might be authors or writing, but seeing themselves as publishers I don’t think comes very naturally to people. 

Apurva: No, folks don’t, and I’ll say that, you know with you and I, Zoe, having that interdisciplinary lens to this field or these sets of fields, if we’re looking at all of them, can be very valuable because we’re sort of challenging those notions of, are you inside that elite sphere, who was able to – or unable to publish something, or are you watching from the outsides. I think we’re really trying to blur those margins and really make it more of a self-determining activity, rather than someone looking at a checklist and saying, “Well do I meet all of these criteria or not.”  

Zoe: Right, absolutely. Those boundaries are barriers, and we’re all about breaking down barriers, yeah. 

Josie: Yeah, Absolutely. I think that’s a good transition to talking about what the Rebus Community is. Could you maybe give listeners kind of an overview of the Rebus Community? 

Apurva: Sure thing. So, the Rebus Community is a non-profit organization. And really what we’re trying to do is to build human capacity. We’re trying to help people through the OER Publishing process, specifically with some professional development programs. We offer in depth courses, we offer webinar series for instructors, faculty, librarians, and other kinds of institutional leaders or even students. And really our goal is to try to de-mystify the open publishing process, encourage OER adoption, support faculty to author new content, introduce students to affordable, high-quality materials. And also make connections between people. We’re trying to build a global OER community and give them the foundational skills to be able to carry on this work in future. And maybe Zoe can speak to sort of the larger pieces of this puzzle, which is about re-imagining the publishing landscape. 

Zoe: [Laughs] Right. Okay, good. Glad I have something else to say because you explained the Rubus Community beautifully. Yeah, we have with this … kind of a parent organization, which is the Rebus Foundation. And the mission there is to re-imagine the publishing ecosystem on open principles. So, we all work with the belief that by applying open principles to every part of the publishing system – or publishing systems – we can make them more expansive, more inclusive, more radical, more cooperative. There’s so much potential when you take an open approach to these things. Now, I always view open as a tool. There are other ways to achieve the kinds of goals we have for the publishing ecosystem, but openness is a really strong one. And so, the work that’s happening in Rebus Community is very much within that broader context, understanding how one kind of publishing can be done really differently and with the values of open – as you know, I think the open education community does a great job of defining – built right into the foundations of that publishing. And it’s also feeding into this wider idea of, how do we do publishing across the board, throughout education, academia, research spaces, anywhere where it’s about the creation and sharing of knowledge. It gives us an opportunity to think about those differently as well. Connect to them, inspire them, all sorts of kinds of things that feed off in lots of directions. And certainly, is really at the forefront of rethinking quite a fundamental process, being the publishing of educational materials, in the name of also thinking about how can we publish everything differently? 

Josie: Mhmm. Apurva could you talk a little bit about how openness shows up in kind of like the day-to-day practices in the Rebus Community and the technologies that you use?  

Apurva: Sure thing. We’re always conscious of the fact that, you know, we’re working here in Toronto, Zoe’s in Montreal, you’re in Victoria. We’re working in Canada, but there are a number of open education practitioners around the world. So very simply we want to begin by having a forum or a conversational space where people could connect, regardless of their time zones or regions. And one of the main pieces, I guess, of the Rebus Community infrastructure is our community forum platform, where people can ask and answer questions, they can post calls for contributions on projects. Really the idea is to be transparent about what folks are working on, to learn from one another, to help each other out, to ensure that the work doesn’t take place in silos, to ensure that our efforts aren’t being duplicated. And we also use other tools for publishing our resources as well, and I might actually pass this over to Zoe to talk a little bit about Pressbooks, which happens to be the Rebus Community’s prefered tool for publishing open texts.  

Zoe: Absolutely. So I got my start with Pressbooks, so it has a special place in my heart. [Laughs]. So Pressbooks is an open-source platform for publishing all kinds of materials, but typically open education materials is where it’s largely used. And so, it’s built on top of WordPress, which is an open-source system itself and has a very large open-source ecosystem, and through the customizations built to Pressbooks, it is a very simple but very powerful tool for publishing any kind of content. You know, back to my early days with Pressbooks, it was incredible to see the uptake in the open education community, and it really kind of lit a fire to see where it could go because it was exactly the purpose of having this tool that is – you know, as we’ve been talking about – accessible to more people, that puts more kind of power and control on their own publishing and to hands of many more people. So, it’s grown and grown from there and has, you know, its own community of open–source users, of contributors, and is certainly well connected into the open education ecosystem to be seeking to contribute what it can as a tool that performs a pretty fundamental function which is, how do you get your content out there? 

Josie: Mhmm, yeah. I’ve worked with Pressbooks since I got into open education – so four and a half years ago, I think – and it’s incredible how much the tool has changed and grown, just in that short period of time. It’s honestly phenomenal. And with the new Pressbooks Directory and seeing how that allows for more collaboration and connection and sharing, bringing all of those different Pressbooks books that are out there in existence now. It’s been… really lovely to see. 

Apurva: Yeah, it’s exciting to see what companies and organizations can do when they sort of focus on the people, and the needs of the people, and really respond directly those rather than sort of chasing the profit dollar. 

Josie: Right. Yeah. It’s pretty easy to sell people on Pressbooks, [laughter] when they see how nice it can look with not too much effort. So, to kind of shift the conversation a bit, how do you think about equity and justice in the context of open education, generally? 

Zoe: To me it’s the absolute fundamental reason why we do this work. Again, open is a tool to achieve something, and something that I think that we’re seeking to achieve in the education space is equity and justice. If tomorrow, openness stopped serving that purpose, you know, certainly me, and I think this is likely true for many, if openness isn’t a thing helping us achieve that, we would seek out the thing that would help us achieve it, rather than sticking with openness. You know, I love the open space, I love what’s possible, I really believe in it. The reason I believe in it is because it’s giving to this goal of equity and justice in education and/or in research and whatever place you want to apply those principles. It’s that fundamental. 

Apurva: Yeah, I agree. I think it informs every aspect of the work, every aspect of decision making. It’s the undercurrent through all of our conversations and actions. And I know that open education has – you know, when we talk about it more generally – the potential to make content more inclusive for learners, to reduce opportunity gaps. But I do want to flag that there needs to be intentional action in order to make this happen. That’s why, sort of having it at the core, as Zoe was describing, is so important. And you know, when we’ve mentioned the word context, it’s helpful to remember that we’re practitioners in Canada. I’m someone who’s from South Asia and the product of a very different education system. So, I’m always conscious of the ways in which we’re working here, the other models for openness that apply to other regions, to people who might be working in non-English languages as well. And I think that an equitable and just model for open education is one that is also mindful of these and finding ways to integrate with this, rather than just being one model to supplant the rest. Because we know from history that that doesn’t work well.  

Josie: Yeah, a bit motivation for me doing this podcast, was kind of this realization in the work that I do in open education – that’s not a new realization – but just like examples that I found of open resources being created that were not inclusive, that had racist content and things like that. And kind of recognizing that, okay, we need to be more intentional here, like we can’t just create open educational resources with no attention to the other ways that exclusion can come into those resources. 

Zoe: Yeah, I’ve been reflecting a little recently on my use of the term “open” because I think I hang a lot on “open” and “open” doesn’t necessarily mean inclusive/accessible. There’s so much more that I think we need to call out more explicitly, to make sure that the content is open *and* there’s a gap there right now. I think “ethical” maybe gets at some of it, but I’ve been toying with whether there is more language needed to capture this focus on equity and justice, alongside, or as well as, or very closely integrated with “openness.” But sometimes it feels like there’s a kernel of something there that we don’t capture when we just use the language of open education.  

Apurva: I think that I mean that the danger of labels is a pitfall that we fall into often, but I think it’s also important for us to acknowledge that struggle because, you know, if we do land on whatever that second adjective is to describe this process, it’s very likely that our needs could change five years from now, and those labels and terms would also need to change. So, to sort of acknowledge that this reflection and retrospection and thinking through is a part of figuring out the best way to think about the work, approach the work, do the work, and create those resources, is critical.  

Josie: Mhmm. To kind of bring it back to publishing, what are some equity and ethical considerations that you think are important for people working on the kind of the publication or the project management side of OER projects. 

Apurva: Oh, I have so many. 

Josie: Let’s hear them! 

[Laughter] 

Apurva: I’d say the big one for me that I’ve learnt is, you know, this idea of a model learner or a sort of single way or process by which people learn, doesn’t really exist. So, I always think at the start of every project, one of the big things to do as a team is to map out the context in which you’re working, the people for whom you’re creating these resources, and seek out and try to understand what their needs and requirements are. What are the best ways in which they learn? Bring those people into your creation teams from day zero, we like to think about it. Co–create, collaborate with them, and plan for the time and work that it takes to make accessible, inclusive, equitable resources, whether it’s in terms of the content, whether it’s in terms of the formats in which those resources are available, or just in terms of team. You know, it takes a lot of time to bring someone who might be completely new to the world of publishing and introduce them to concepts within the field. I have more, but I will let Zoe jump in and share all of her wisdom as well. 

Zoe: I just want to hear all of yours [laughs]. I’ll link a little bit of that and build on it. I think there really needs to be a conscious effort from day one to think through the implications of what creating a project together will look like, and then how it’s going to be used in the world and that’s both why students, learners, and also by people who might be adapting, remixing, and building forward. And there is often I think a risk that there’s so much that you’re learning about publishing itself and how to go through practical steps of bringing people together and writing the content and editing it and getting it out there, it’s really important to also take the time to be very explicit about things, like Apurva was just saying, around the context. And there’s so much there that gets assumed that can get, you know, you can get distracted from it because you’re facing the very practical things. So I would really encourage people who are encountering this work to set aside dedicated time up front, seek out resources that support you to identify what questions you need to answer from day zero. There may be things that you haven’t thought about thinking about yet, and so it’s a question of being very deliberate and building in upfront the kinds of structures, changes, patterns, interactions, you know. There’s so much in there that needs to be thought through with this lens of equity. 

Apurva: Being flexible and adaptable as well, because, as you said Zoe, there are things that you might not know to think about at day zero. They might only crop up at day 260. 

Zoe: Right. 

Apurva: So you need to be adaptable in order to adjust and respond.  

Zoe: Mhmm. 

Apurva: And as we’re sort of gesturing towards the future and sort of the time that these projects take, one thing that I’ve had to learn is letting go of what I think is sort of the finish line for a product. I’ve learnt that with open education resources especially, you have to see your resource in action, in use, if it’s in a classroom, or a lab, or whatever environment that you’ve designed for it, and see how it plays out in the hands of instructors and learners, and then revise it to make sure it works better, it functions better. So, I think that’s when open publishing comes hand–in–hand with open pedagogy or other kinds of open educational practices. It’s sort of the stepping stone to another way of thinking about teaching and learning more generally. And you know, you don’t need to consider all of that when you’re starting out an open publishing project or managing an OER project. But to know that those are the paths it could take you on is helpful. And I find, having been on those paths, it’s very rewarding. 

Josie: Yeah. That’s such a good point. And I think in the context that I work in, where we’re creating these resources and then we want them to get into the open textbook collection. Which is supposed to be this static kind of copy of the book that’s not supposed to change. And then it doesn’t ever get changed. And like, there’s a bit of a… a disconnect in there that I think… me and other people at BCcampus need to think about. [Laughs]. 

Zoe: It’s a very real challenge and this is where you run into some of the structures of publishing aren’t designed for this kind of content 

Josie: Mhmm. 

Zoe: This comes up time and time again. If you want to have a static repository of content, it’s essentially a library, right? Library books are done. They aren’t evolving, they aren’t changing, they aren’t being revised, they— you know, or it’s happening over a very, very long period of time. So, this is not a BCcampus problem [laughter]. it’s certainly something I encourage you to explore and figure out. But, you know, we’ve run into that time and time again at Rebus Community is thinking through, you know, when you run up against a traditional publishing structure, whether it is something like, should we have ISBN’s for our books? Or you know, how do you start an editing process when maybe half of the content isn’t finished yet because it’s going to be done over a long period of time? So, I don’t know if this is a take heart moment, but certainly this is, you know, when you’re trying to rethink how publishing happens, you are going to run up against pre–existing structures that just don’t work for this kind of content. And there’s a real excitement in that. It’s also a real challenge in terms of figuring out how to navigate through it and keep that balance of doing what you need to to meet certain standards or whatever that might be expected of you. And also then push back and say, well why is it done like that? And how can we do it differently? 

Josie: Mhmm. Yeah, I think it’s a challenge, especially with a lot of the advocacy. We’re kind of— A lot of the time, we’re trying to just get instructors to adopt an open textbook. And if it looks more like a textbook that they’re used to, they’re more likely to feel comfortable doing that. And it’s not going to change on them, and they— you know, it’s dealing with those expectations, but also trying to allow for things that are different, like things that aren’t “textbooks” as we maybe traditionally understand them.  

Zoe: I think I also would like to bring up thinking about ethical considerations in publishing. And this is one where I don’t have easy answers, but I think it’s incredibly important to acknowledge the labour that goes into these projects. It’s enormous. Over, you know, the past several years of working in open education, I’ve just seen hours and hours and years and years of people’s commitment to this work. And it’s truly a thing to behold. It has given me so much hope and heart, *and* there’s this unresolved question of, how can we keep asking people to do all this work without adequately compensating them or rewarding them? And you know, the kind of standard reward is compensation, and you know… So, no easy answers, but I think if you are asking labour of people, if you are engaging them in this way, and certainly if you, yourself, are taking on a side project or something that’s kind of feeling like a passion project to commit to this, there’s a wealth of resources around how to kind of manage that and be a good steward of these projects, and also those of us who are thinking structurally about open education publishing have to constantly be reflecting on and grappling with and exploring how we can better reward the people who are giving their time to this.  

Apurva: And I’ll say financially compensate them for their work, but also build in a recognition process into our systems. So, I know in B.C. there has been some advancement with tenure and promotion policies. I know there are other institutions and universities that are acknowledging the labour involved in creating open educational resources, adopting them, adapting them, or teaching with them, and rewarding instructors in the same way they would if they were publishing a traditional monograph with a university press. So, I think… Yeah, thinking intentionally about those structures is useful and I will flag, you know, if we’re looking at the diversity of the open education field right now, we can do a lot better. And that’s really because there’s a privilege in who has the time to volunteer their skills and expertise on these projects and who cannot. And this takes us back to Zoe’s point about funding and compensation. If this is going to be a sustainable movement, if this is going to be the norm twenty years from now. 

Josie: Mhmm. Do you think that the collaborative model used by Rebus is like one strategy for addressing that labour? Being able to kind of take a more crowd-sourcing, collaborative, distributed approach? 

Apurva: I think it’s one way to do it. I think there are ways it could improve. You know, I want to acknowledge that a lot of the projects that we work with have been able to get this far because of grants provided by their institution. The value that I see in the Rebus approach really is about the transparency and sort of, public approach to the work. The explicit welcoming of people who might not traditionally be involved in these processes to come join, and that could be anywhere from students, but to designers, or filmmakers, or people in other industries or walks of life. We try to build in time for community conversation, make sure that teams are as central the story of the resource as just the content or the gap that they’re filling is. You know, we try as much as possible to value marginalized voices, and just exposing people through this process, exposing people through the work, and exposing them to a new way of creating content, publishing content, that is more inclusive that does have community at the core and the heart, can in itself be a step towards that more sustainable future. But I would love to see more investment in OER from different systems, not just from foundations who we’ve been privileged to partner with and work with. So, I think ours is a start but we have a long way we could go. 

Zoe: Yeah, with rose–coloured glasses on a little bit, something I hope that the transparency that the Rubus Community process offers as well is visibility on the work it takes to do this work.  

Josie: Right. 

Zoe: And going back to again that idea of publishing being something that is not typical understood or just visible to most people. I think that the approach that the Rebus Community undertakes and encourages and facilitates shows what it looks like to do this work. And so my hope is that by having that out there, everybody who’s invested in the success of the open education movement can see a bit more about what it’s going to take to achieve sustainability.  

Josie: Yeah, absolutely. Where do you see the value in these community and collaborative approaches to OER publishing? 

Apurva: Again, it feels like all along the way. Collaborative models, and I know specifically when we’re explaining the importance of teams and people to the projects we work with, we extremely stress on the fact that diverse teams really do produce more equitable resources. And this is not just me saying it as someone who’s a person of colour and who is in this space. But really, the research shows us that working with people who don’t have the same backgrounds, skills, or experiences as you do, forces you to think through challenges or questions from different perspectives. And it’s in that moment of communication and conversation with someone else who is really coming at it with different needs that you’re also exposed to something new. And you realize how your resource might need to be modified to also work for that person, and how you’re not just building for someone who looks and works and exactly like yourself, but you’re really trying to build something that is a little more modular and flexible and can be picked up and used by more people. You know, it’s easy for us to sort of live and operate in a bubble, but once the bubble bursts and you see that there are folks that have different needs and operate in different contexts and different regions, that’s when you also realize that a problem exists that you hadn’t been aware of before. 

Josie: I was wondering if you could share a little bit about, like, what does it look like to build community and to build teams like that. 

Apurva: It takes a lot of, again, intentional work. Some of the things that we have learnt to do over time is to really let it be known that that is what we’re trying to do. We are trying to build a representative team. We’re trying to involve people in this process who might not have previously been invited to work here. I think it’s about reminding people that they can make contributions that can be as big and critical to the project or very small but still just as important and critical. It’s understanding that folks have many pathways into doing this work and those pathways come with valuable contributions. And Zoe I know you’ve been part of many collaborative projects, so I’m curious about how you felt your experience was like. 

Zoe: Yeah. Yeah, you know, in some of the projects where I think we’ve seen the most incredible community building, there’s a little bit of magic in it that I think comes from shared belief and a shared enjoyment in the work. That there’s a belief that what you’re doing is important, and that you’re all in it together. That kind of community spirit has evolved in, you know, several of the projects I worked closely with. And I think in some ways – I’ve always found it a little difficult to articulate exactly where that comes from but again – I think it comes down to shared intention and, you know, that kind of buying in to, this is a really valuable use of your time and something to do together. And that there’s an openness to other people being a part of that too. It doesn’t have to come from, say, you know, I’ve seen maybe projects start with collaborators who have known each other for a little while. They’re kind of maybe, one, two, three of them, and then by being open to others buying in, that’s grown and grown and grown to, you know, these incredible communities full of lots of different people who then bring their perspectives and really influence – really, really, substantially influence – the direction of the project,. I think that’s critical to say. And as Apurva was saying this, I mean there’s value in that. Yeah, that’s certainly a pattern I’ve seen a little bit. There’s a spark that comes from that. 

Apurva: Yeah. In addition to the motivation, I’ll say something that we do with a lot of our projects, in that initial project–scoping phase when they’re sort of framing and trying to conceptualize what the project is going to look like, we ask them to work as a team to list out what we call their “measures of success.” And you know, for most projects it’s going to be, “I want to get this project done. I want it to be published or complete.” But we really encourage them to sort of think beyond that. What does success look like for them? Is it connecting with “x” number of practitioners in their field or in related fields and bring them to be part of the project? Is it working and trialing this resource out with students and getting their feedback? Are there other pedagogical models that they’d like to explore through the creation of this resource? There can be many ways to define success on a project, and for most of them, I will say, it boils down to connecting with people, making sure that this resource has an impact on various groups of learners that they’ve identified. And it’s not always just getting to that finish line. But sort of the means to this larger end, which is changing the field for instance, replacing a commercial textbook that’s saving students money, and coming up with a really new way of engaging with students. 

Zoe: And enjoying working together, too. [Laughter] 

Apurva: Enjoying that, yeah. I will say that with the textbook success program, which is sort of a yearlong professional development course that I facilitate, a lot of my end of year evaluations really highlight the importance of the cohort model. They’re all working on different projects and different disciplines in different stages in different regions, but they come together and connect frequently and regularly on— and just discuss the work that they’re doing. And it’s sort of just that act of being able to have a shared space where you can talk about this work because you know, going back to what Zoe said in her introduction, it spans so many different areas and disciplines and industries, not just publishing. And for folks to come together and identify that they’re not alone in this work, that they’re also not alone in some of the struggles. You know, if you have writers block or if you don’t quite know how to figure out this open tool that you’re using, you can share those frustrations or worries with others in the group and find solace and comfort in the fact that people have been there before, or even if not, that they’re there to support you through that. And that’s where really the value of the community lies. And for us as well to be able to have this conversation together, as people who have worked in this field in different ways, but to be able to share our learnings is wonderful. 

Josie: Yeah, absolutely. Super valuable to be able to connect with people and to commiserate or celebrate [laughter], you know, it’s very, very, valuable. What are some of the challenges that you’ve encountered, trying to build community? 

Apurva: A big one that comes to mind for me is pulling people out of the entrenched tools and workflows that they have been used to, especially for folks who have been involved in academia, and been using particular systems and ways of going about their work for decades. It can be tough to break the habit and have them test out a new space or a new way of communicating and doing things. And sort of getting everyone to be able to not only, you know, have an account on the same platform, but to really be using it fruitfully is the biggest challenge. In addition to obviously finding the funding to compensate everyone fairly. 

Zoe: Yeah. I second both of those. The first thing that came to my mind was email, which is a little reductive.  But certainly, when the activity that’s happening on a project ends up being a bit kind of hidden away, that just sometimes we’ve seen that kind of lead to… a lack of pickup and progress and excitement. And that’s not to say that that doesn’t work for some people. I’m completely sure that some people are creating excellent projects, and they’re doing all of their communication via email. But occasionally people do get stuck in those patterns. And that can kind of just close off a couple of possibilities here and there that can then snowball a little bit into some challenges for the project, if there isn’t kind of a really strong driver kind of making sure that it’s all moving forward. Which I think is common to any kind of project. That sometimes it just doesn’t quite take off in the way you want to, it becomes a little more of a slog. 

Josie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about successes? 

Zoe: Again, I go back to like there’s a little pixie dust sometimes like, you know [laughter]. This is the least useful information in the world, I’m sure. But I mean this is why we’ve worked to kind of profile and talk to the people who have had amazingly successful projects. I’m thinking of the Introduction to Philosophy, OER Course Markings, Blueprint for Success. There are some examples where there’s just been magic, and it’s incredible to behold. So, if there are resources associated with this podcast, we can share some of the case studies and things that have tried to pull out what makes those so successful. There’s just kind of a buzz you get sometimes, but, you know, Apurva’s much closer to it than I am these days, so I’m sure she has something more practical [laughs]. 

Apurva: Well, I was going to say it’s one we’ve already discussed before. For me the big successes are just seeing the impact of groups and cohorts working together. That’s definitely been my biggest take away. I know 2020 being the year that it was, I would often go into my OER project sessions and leave feeling reenergized, revitalized, rejuvenated, because I’ve just been able to go in and talk to people who are doing this work very informally and casually, for about an hour and a half. And there’s just real value in establishing those kinds of professional relationships with people. And value that I’ve seen others also echo and sort of highlight and hold dear to their selves as well. I think the big successes again, are not just in creating the resources, but creating the communities that exist around those resources. Because that’s really the way that we can change some of the systems in which we’re currently trying to operate.  

Zoe: I completely agree with it. I’ll try to come to something a little more practical as well. I think openness to opportunity, I think we’ve seen go far as well. That being open to the possibility of someone coming to you with an idea that you never thought of. And to me, this is— I think this is at the heart of why I love, you know, open licenses, open content, generally. You don’t know what someone else is going to do with the work that you’ve started. And I think there have been cases where we’ve seen a project that has started along a path—and been able to continue along that path, and kind of achieve what it set out to—and some other, you know, parallel path has sprouted out with someone doing translation, or they’re creating an audiobook, or something that you wouldn’t have envisioned from the start. And the projects who are open to and positioned to kind of bring that work in and really incorporate it as part of the project at large, we’ve seen some amazing kind of results from that. 

Apurva: Yeah, we talked about pathways in, and this is sort of pathways out, and the many shapes and forms these documents can take. I’ve seen that with people too, they come in with the intention of publishing a book and they leave with a whole new understanding of how they could teach. And they’re sort of taking so much out of a process that really was telling them the A to Z of the publishing process, but through those interactions with people and through thinking about other ways of doing things, are leaving as changed people with new perspectives, and I think that’s a big success. 

Josie: Absolutely. The final question is a very big question, but where do you see the potential for open publishing practices to disrupt exclusionary and oppressive systems and structures in education? 

Apurva: Oh wow, another big question to close us out. [Laughter] I always come back to the fact that open publishing, and our way of approaching it in particular, is people and human centric. So, as I said before, we’re really not focused on raking in every last dollar, but rather we’re focusing the needs of learners, and instructors, and staff, and the key players in the space, the stakeholders in this space. So, the fact that this type of process can be co-created with community, with people at the core, and create models that are owned by us all, that can be adapted by us all if we need it to be, I think there’s value in that. You know the more I think about it for me, and this is my personal approach to open education—education more generally-–I really see education as a human right. It is as essential as food, shelter, water, health care. And it’s what makes the world turn in so many ways. It’s what shapes us as people. It’s what shapes us as members of society. And therefore, it’s so important that the system itself be created by the people, be used by the people. I think the biggest potential is for us all is to align towards those centres as people and not just money. And see the wonders that education could do if it’s really reimagined as a service industry. 

Zoe: Awesome. I love hearing you talk about that, Apurva. For me, I come back to the power of publishing. So, when you think about particularly educational resources someone by publishing–-I’ll use textbook, but that’s a shorthand for lots of things–-by publishing a textbook, you’re putting a stake in the ground saying, “This thing is worth knowing.” And so who decides what is worth knowing? Who can access what is worth knowing? Who can create the communication that says this is worth knowing? All of these things are so incredibly powerful and so that power must be shared and distributed. Any concentration of that power is massively damaging to the world on any level. You know, fundamentally, access to knowledge, access to the creation of knowledge, participation in the creation of knowledge, is a human right as well, to kind of echo what Apurva was saying. And so, when you believe in the power of knowledge, in all the ways people can interact with it, you have to work to ensure that it is not being used to cause harm, that it is not incidentally causing harm, and that it is as much owned by everybody who can and should be participating and benefitting from it, as possible. Again, that’s kind of the fundamental thing for me with publishing broadly. And in the education context, that means publishing of educational content has to be open and equitable, and everybody should have ownership of the systems to create their own knowledge, to create all the different forms of knowledge, the different ways of knowing. There’s just a myriad of different possibilities in the world that have to be supported by these systems, or they aren’t doing their job as far as I’m concerned. 

[Theme Music] 

Josie: You can learn about the Rebus Community and explore their platform at about.rebus.community. And Rebus is spelled R-E-B-U-S. If you are interested in learning more about collaborative and open publishing models and practices, you should check out two incredible resources created by the Rebus Community, including A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students and The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far). You can also follow the Rebus Community on Twitter at @RebusCommunity. You can connect with Apurva on LinkedIn. Her profile URL is LinkedIn.com/in/ApurvaAshok. And you can follow Zoe on twitter at @ZWHNZ.  

You can learn more about this podcast at knowledgespectrums.opened.ca. On the website, you can find all episodes and transcripts, along with many other resources and information related to this project. You can connect with me on Twitter @josiea_g and you can tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #OKSPodcast. 

The theme song is “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License. 

This episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. So you are welcome to share and remix the episode, as long as you give credit, provide a link back to the original source, and share any remixed work under the same license. 

I record this podcast on the traditional and unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, including the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, and the lands of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. I am very grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on these lands. 

This has been Open Knowledge Spectrums Podcast. Thanks for listening. 

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[Theme music: “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org]

Josie Gray: Hello! Welcome to the Open Knowledge Spectrums podcast, which explores questions of epistemic justice, or knowledge equity, in the context of open education and considers different possibilities for making open education and open educational practices more equitable.

My name is Josie Gray, and I am your host. This podcast is my final project for my Masters of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Amy Nusbaum, about projects she has led to localize and diversify an introduction to psychology open textbook. Dr. Amy Nusbaum earned her Bachelors of Psychology in 2015, her Masters of Psychology in 2016, and PhD in Experimental Psychology in 2020, all from Washington State University. She is currently an assistant Professor at Heritage University, a Hispanic-serving, and Native-American-serving/non-tribal institution located in Toppenish, Washington. Amy was recently awarded the Wilbert. J. Mckeachie award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, which recognizes one graduate student instructor each year for excellence in teaching, and the 2020 Fred Mulder Award, for best open education research paper from the Global OER Graduate Network. Her research in teaching centre issues of educational access and equity, with a specific focus on first generation students and people marginalized by racism and/or sexism.

And with that, let’s hear from Amy.

[Theme music]

Amy Nusbaum: I am a first-year faculty member in psychology at Heritage University, which is in central Washington, in an area outside of Yakima, Washington. I just finished my PhD in experimental psychology at Washington State University—I guess just… it’s almost been a year now—after getting my undergraduate degree there as well. So I’ve been in Pullman, Washington, for a while now. I am a first-generation college student and really struggled with college costs, generally, but specifically, textbooks costs as a student, and so as a graduate student, as I was finding ways to get involved with these kinds of practices. I really fell into the open education world ,and I’m excited to continue getting to do that work with my current students and my current job.

Josie: So open education was something you came to as a student, is that right?

Amy: As a graduate student, yeah. So, during my time as graduate student, most of the students in my program end up teaching independently. So I, from years 2 through 5 of my program, was teaching courses. And, you know, was frequently running into students who couldn’t buy their textbook. And you know, as a student with a background who also couldn’t buy their textbooks at times, like, I couldn’t tell them to “Suck it up and buy it,” right? Because I know that’s not how life works. And so, by way of, I think, teaching practice and just experiences with those kinds of students, I got more interested in open education. And I was definitely coming at it from the angle of free textbooks, which I know is sort of how a lot of people get into it. I’m now more involved in sort of the other aspects of openness, but definitely got into it from the free textbook side of it. And then, sort of took a while to convince some other people in my department that that was a way to go. But for the last few years as a graduate student, we were using open textbooks in our intro psych classes, which are all taught by graduate students. And it was sort of— then trickling down to some other courses as well.

Josie: Cool. So, you were able to kind of make that shift in your whole department.

Amy: I certainly wouldn’t claim credit. [laughter] I think there was some seeds that were planted, and I have a tendency to be obnoxious about things that I want to see happen. So, I was poking, I think, some correct buttons, but there were definitely other people in the department who were doing some advocacy work on their own. Dr. Carrie Cuttler who’s been involved in open ed in different levels, was already using books in her particular classes. And so, there were a few entry points, but I will take some credit for being annoying and not letting people forget about it.

Josie: Yeah. Great strategy. [Laughs] So how does open education show up in your teaching?

Amy: As a framework, open education is everything that I do, right. So especially in the last few years I think I’ve taken open education to be more than just free textbooks, and really a conversation about who gets to decide what’s important? Who’s teaching content? What’s included in content? What are we asking students to do with their work? Because from a purely pedagogical perspective, I really hate assignments where student writes it, I grade it, and then it goes away for forever. So I think the thought process of open education really permeates everything I do. I think the two big examples are in terms of course costs. There are no costs in my courses from using mostly openly licensed materials, at least free materials. And then most of my classes have assignments that are also in the open pedagogy sphere. So things like, they’re creating infographics based on research articles that make their research articles more accessible to a general audience. Or this semester, my capstone classes are working on a wiki-education project where they’re editing and adding to Wikipedia pages. So, it appears differently depending on the particular class, but I really think it’s a holistic approach to what it is to teach and what you’re asking students to do.

Josie: Right, absolutely. The textbook is such a great entry point, but it does open up a lot of other possibilities in the general open education space.

Amy: Yeah.

Josie: So, from your experience, you talk about the financial benefits for students, but how else does open education support greater equity in post-secondary education?

Amy: I think finances are a big one, obviously. Having access to your textbooks early, though I know there’s some debate in the research world of whether that accessibility hypothesis holds. But I think it really… it evens the playing field. You know, I think of how— I knew a friend in undergraduate that was able to keep all her textbooks, and so like, when she was studying for the psychology subject GRE, she just had all of her textbooks available to her. I could never do that. I had to sell them back so I could buy my next round. So even if we’re not talking about, you know, a particular class or spending money in one class, those decisions I think are a bit of a domino effect. You know, in one of my papers, we look at whether students are going to select classes based on their— whether there’s an OER designator by the class, and we find it affects students course decisions, right. So, you think about things like—and I’m not going to make a causal claim here because there’s no evidence for a causal claim—but thinking about relationships that exist. And for instance, lowered percentages of low-income or Black and brown students who are persuing, like, medical degrees. Textbooks in those fields are also really expensive, right. So it would be really interesting to look at whether there’s a correlation there, whether students who can’t afford their textbooks are looking at classes when they’re registering and being like, “I can’t have that $300 textbook, so I guess I should find something else to do.” I think it goes beyond the one class that the OER text exists in, and is really a cascading effect that can have a lot of downstream issues. And so, I just think OER is… is often talked about in that one-class situation, like my class is using textbooks, but I think is we think about it at a broader level, we’ll actually find even more exciting stuff that we can do with these kinds of approaches.

Josie: Right, yeah absolutely. So, from your perspective, where is open education falling short?

Amy: Yeah. I think we very much run the risk of replicating the current systems of—you used the word systems of exclusion, which I like—if we re-design something where it’s generally the same people writing or working on OER that were always working on commercial textbooks, and the only difference is that they’re free. Free is certainly better. But as we’ve already talked about, there’s lots of other reasons why OER are good.

I think right now we’re falling short in terms of the people at the top of our movement. I mean there was lots of drama around the OpenEd conference in 2019 for some of those reasons, right. And I think that you’re seeing people start to realize that… “Well, crap. Did we just do the same thing and make it no cost?” And so I don’t necessarily think it’s a fatal flaw, but I think the movement is at a point where we’ve got traction, right. A lot of people know what OER are. A lot of students have had them in our classes. And so we’re, I think rapidly approaching a point where if we engrain what we’re doing right now as “this is what open ed is,” we run the risk of just being a copy-paste of a publisher’s—or a commercial publisher’s—format. So again, I don’t think it’s a fatal flaw, but I think it’s somewhere that we need to work on in terms of making sure that we’re following people who should be followed. Or maybe not having follower/following situations in the first place. [Laughs] I don’t know what exactly it looks like!

Josie: Right, like valuing those critical perspectives that cause us to reflect and consider what kind of system we’re creating.

Amy: Yeah, I talked earlier about the idea that open pedagogy really transcends just free textbooks, right. It’s how we think about who is important enough to talk about things. And I think that has to be reflected in our discourse outside of the classroom also. And making sure that we’re, you know, involving from community colleges, who aren’t necessarily always valued in the way that they should be. Or the student perspective. And I think people who get to OER often… want to do those things, it just perhaps hasn’t been modeled for them. And so I think making sure we’re following our own values is going to be important.

Josie: Yeah, for sure. I know people talk a lot about, like— I don’t work within a post-secondary institution, but people who do often talk about the lack of supports that there are for faculty to do open education work, to like create OER or to adapt. Have you had that experience, where either the supports have been there or haven’t been there?

Amy: Yeah. So I think a little bit of both. As a graduate student for most of my time I felt really lucky because my research mentors were pretty much of the mind that as long as I was doing what I needed to do for them, they weren’t paying much attention to what I was doing outside of the lab. So, I was lucky in that I was able to work on those kinds of things. And, you know, as long as I was willing to work 60 hours a week to fit all that stuff in, then that was fine. And so I don’t think my story is traditional in that sense. I was a single, child-free person, who could do whatever she wanted with her time, and that’s not a good system to replicate, right.

Josie: Mhmm.

Amy: I have seen a lot of faculty members, especially non-tenured, or non-tenure-track faculty members, who report really wanting to do these kinds of things. But they’re teaching four full loads and don’t get paid over the summer. So when, when is that going to happen? Some universities certainly have internal supports for that, so my graduate institution did have a grant program that was pretty prolific, just in terms of the amount of money it was able to give out to support either faculty or graduate students to create OER. So those are the kinds of programs that are great. My current institution is much smaller. So while it’s— they’re incredibly supportive of OER, and I think I’ll definitely be able to take the time to do that. There’s not like and internal grant program for that, because it just doesn’t make sense in this context. So, I think the answer is both, and. So, we—again sort of the colloquial “we”—need to think about how we support people who aren’t at institutions that have that internal support. And what it looks like to do that in an equitable way.

Josie: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s a lot of the big questions people are asking about that wider sustainability and allowing more people to participate where there aren’t always supports to do so.

Amy: Right, and it’s not an easy question, right. Money doesn’t just come out of nowhere, and we’re not making money. I was doing a presentation for our faculty at my new institution about a month ago, and someone asked like, how do you equitably support people? Because if you’re writing a textbook for a traditional publisher, you probably don’t make that much. But you go into it, you sign a contract on your own, you understand the conditions. How do you do that in a situation where the person is not able to make money? And one of the things we talked about, you know, is having appropriate state-level support, right. So in the state of Washington, we have decent support. It’s not as good as it could be, and so I think that’s like— State and federal governments are a way, or provincial governments are a way to get that kind of support. You know, the money we need is not… a whole lot, right. If you look at the state budget, it would be like one tenth of one tenth of a percent, right. It’s nothing in their eyes. But to us it could be everything. And so, being creative about how we access those the streams of a financial support.

Josie: Mhmm, for sure. So, last year you published an article describing a project to diversify the OpenStax psychology open textbook. Could you tell me more about that project?

Amy: It was sort of a two-headed monster, and it honestly wasn’t originally intended to be that way. But it just.. shook out that way. So, the in-class version: I was teaching an intro psychology for the fifth or sixth time. It was a class that I felt like I’d gotten the basic mechanics of and so was ready to do something a little more expansive. And so, as a class, the students took on the project of basically editing their own textbook, right. So, I like these kinds of projects because… textbooks need to be edited… But also, again it gets at this idea of who gets to contribute knowledge, right? Like I believe my students have valuable things to contribute to a textbook. I don’t think they realize that they have that power in themselves, or at least a lot of them don’t. And so for a couple reasons I like that project. It was a multi-step, semester-long project. The students, they could write on other things that were sort of outside the diversity scope. So, they could add general research articles as well, and make other modifications. We ended up with something like 900 annotations on the textbook. They used Hypothes.is to like annotate directly onto the textbook. I then had a team—through the funding that my graduate institution offered—I was able to pay a team of undergraduates, who had previously been in the class but we’re now more advanced students, to go through the comments and basically select the ones that would be appropriate for a textbook-level content. I love my students but not all 1000 of those comments [laughs] were ready to be put into a textbook. So there was this next layer where undergraduate employees were going through and sort of selecting comments for their rigor and just the general sense of fit with the textbooks. And we ended up with something… somewhere around 80 comments that ended up integrated into the local version of the textbook that WSU uses. So, from the beginning of WSU’s time using the OpenStax book, they had taken advantage of the license and made a local Pressbooks copy. And so we were able to make it hyper-specific to our students. So, there were, you know, in the treatment and disorders section of the book we were able to link directly to our counselling services, right, and so there were some edits that were like that. There were some, like, for instance where Washington has a really high population of Latinx immigrant farm workers because the central part of the region is a big farm worker area. And so, a couple students added information in like, the diversity sections, that were specific to what students’ families often look like. And so, there were a wide variety of changes, but that was the student-lead part of it.

Around the same time, I think it was after OpenStax 2019—no 2018. I had reached out to OpenStax to ask about leading a project to diversify the national version of the text. This was an effort specifically aimed at diversification, and so it wasn’t just a general revision process. And they were super gung-ho and so, I was like, “Cool, okay now what?” And so, ended up basically doing a whole lot of cold emailing. So I set up the Hypothes.is layers—like from the tech side had that all set up. And then looked for people who were doing research in areas that I thought made sense. Like, looked for some affinity groups that I thought made sense. So like the Black psychologist groups and things like that. Sent emails to our psychology teaching groups. I think on one day I sent like 1200 emails…

Josie: Wow! [laughs]

Amy: It was like publicly available emails, which means that like a lot of them are wrong by that point. So I remember I took a picture at one point of all of the “Return-to-sender emails” I was getting in my inbox. There was like a hundred of them. So it absolutely was not efficient whatsoever, and I would probably do it a little bit differently. Oh! And OpenStax also provided me—this is where all of the return emails came back—they provided me with like their list of people who are using the book and had said, “Yes, we can be contacted.” And there are a lot of people using that book.

Josie: Mhmm.

Amy: So it was a massive undertaking, and I’m not sure I realized how massive it was when I was like, “Yeah! Let’s do this.” But, got back some really awesome comments. So those were similar process to what the students did. It was a Hypothes.is layer on a Pressbooks copy. And I basically… Once they were all collected, as I said, OpenStax was going through their own wider revision process at a time. And so I basically sent them on to their team, and was like, “Here. Here’s a bunch of really great ideas for how to make this book better.” And to my knowledge, some of those where then inserted into the national, sort of,  core textbook that is used for intro-psych classes.

So those were the two projects that were sort of going on at the same time. One, a hyper-local effort to really both empower my students to be like “Yes! You can do this,” while also creating a localized version of the text that made sense for us, and then a more national effort geared at diversification of the book on a wider level, reaching out to subject matter experts.

Josie: Yeah. So you’ve mentioned Hypothes.is and Pressbooks a few times. Could you describe what those tools are, just for those who aren’t familiar?

Amy: Pressbooks is basically like an online publishing tool. It allows people to publish open textbooks in a way that I think is familiar to students. So it doesn’t just look like, you know, someone just put a Word document on a website and said, “Here, read this.” At least in my experience, it’s incredibly helpful for working with other open textbooks because it’s really easy to utilize licenses and like, copy a textbook that someone used across the country into your own format and then just give students a link to yours after you’ve made edits, so you’re not accidentally editing someone else’s stuff without them knowing.

Hypothes.is is then an annotation tool—or I think they call it a social-annotation tool. You can embed Hypothes.is into Pressbooks, so super great functionality between those two. And then when a student goes to read the textbook, there’s sort of a sidebar that pops up from Hypothesis, where they can highlight things and comment on them, other students can see what they’re doing. And so, it’s basically the idea that if you have a physical textbook, you’d be able to literally highlight it and write things (if it belonged to you). It’s sort of taking that idea and putting it into the virtual space. With the added benefit that other people can see and sort of collaboratively do that process.

So that’s how students were putting their annotations on. So they’d highlight a section and say something like, “Add this sentence here,” and they’d write their work. That’s also how we did peer review, so students could then see what their peers had proposed and make comments. It’s how we did grading. So it was really nice to keep both myself and my teaching assistants from getting overwhelmed with the process of doing something that was out of our learning management system, that was a little bit novel, because it was able to all be housed in one spot.

Josie: And so, with the instructor-focused project, did you do any kind of vetting about who could participate?

Amy: I mean, I vetted in the sense that I was sending direct emails. But I also posted things on social media and some Facebook groups and stuff like that. So sort of, but not really.

Josie: Was that really something that was— would’ve been important? Or were you more looking for general— like open to general contributions?

Amy: I think I was open to general contributions because I knew that there was— like it’s not like these things— Like someone made a comment and they were automatically in the textbook. Like I knew that there was going to be several more stages of looking at comments, and sort of a peer-review-like process. And so, if some malfeasance slipped in, I guess I wasn’t super concerned about it being problematic. And I think I was very clear in the call that I wanted—or was interested in—perspectives from people who— I can’t remember how I phrased it. But I made it clear that it wasn’t just Psych-PhDs who should be commenting. It was people who had perspectives or experience in the field of psychology, I think is what I said. And so, I think if there was a… highly structured betting process, that would’ve excluded some of the people who I was interested in reaching.

Josie: Mhmm, for sure. And so, what were the responses like?

Amy: On that side of things, they were pretty highly focused in the social psychology, the disorders, and the sort of sex and gender sections, which makes sense from several different angles. But mainly because a lot of the work in psychology that’s focused on diversity happens to fall within those subject areas. So, I guess that wasn’t particularly surprising.

There were comments like, “This would be a good place to talk about intergenerational trauma in Black Americans and Native Americans.” So in the section of the textbook where we’re talking about how chronic stress can lead to… like negative consequences down the line, someone came in and was like, “It would be really good to talk about how this is true both in an individual person, but also across generations.” And we’re talking about things like the consequences of slavery or the Holocaust—there was a study that was done recently on that. And so that was one example that I can think of that was, you know, pretty easy to embed in the textbook. Like, yeah, you’re absolutely right. We should talk about how the stress is experienced disproportionately.

There was another one that I can think of where the person said that the textbook doesn’t do a good enough job talking about the disproportionality in the ability to access mental health services. So there’s a section in the text that talks about how lots of people don’t—who can benefit from mental health services—don’t seek them. And the number’s abysmally low. It’s something like 13% of people who could benefit don’t seek services. But those numbers are even lower if you’re not looking at just white people, right? So, you know, you have some sentence were someone’s reading it and it’s like, “Wow, that’s unfortunate. We should do something about that.” But there’s— It’s even worse, like when we think about other systemic problems, and that information just wasn’t included.

So, there’s a lot of things like that, that weren’t even massive changes. It’s not like—well, there’s a couple places where entire sections could be added—but most of it was fairly minor stuff that just hadn’t been included, and it’s the kind of stuff that sparks really great conversations in classes if we’re talking about it.

Josie: Yeah, wow. So after you received the comments, you handed them off to OpenStax?

Amy: Yeah, because they were doing, again, their sort of full-fledged revision process of the text at the same time. And so I basically said “Here’s some stuff we did!” And they then had the option to integrate it or to not integrate it.

Josie: Right. And then the second part of your study was like, looking at how those edits impacted different students. So did you edit a few chapters yourself for that?

Amy: Yeah, so the way that I did that— So for the study part of it, the research part of it, I was interested in looking at whether… basically reading the diversified version of a textbook would change how people feel about their sense of belongingness on campus. That was my approach because we know that, one, we have gaps in retention and graduation based on a number of factors. I chose to focus on people who are marginalized by their race and by first-generation status. We know that those groups of students persist and graduate at lower rates and then their white, continuing-generation counterparts. When I say continuing generation, I mean people whose parents had bachelor’s degrees. And we… one of the hypothesized reasons for this, with some data to support it, is that those students don’t feel like they belong on campus as much. Because they don’t see themselves reflected in their peers, they don’t necessarily see themselves reflected in their faculty or their staff. And so, like, we should be able to do some things about that, right? We can’t necessarily overnight—or at least as an instructor, I can’t overnight fix… the college affordability crisis, right? But I can try to make students feel like they belong in my classroom, because they do. So, that was the approach I took, that if we provide students with materials that reflect them as human beings, that’s one way of saying “Hey. You and people like you belong in this space.”

So I took a sort of hybrid version of the textbook. So I took some of the edits that were done by my students and some of the edits that were done by sort of that the wider audience, and specifically focused on two sections: so the section in social psychology that focusses on discrimination and the section that focusses on gender and sexuality. Again, because those are places where it’s fairly simple to make these kinds of changes, right. If you’re not talking about diversity in those sections, then you’ve got a problem.

So I recruited a group of students, like 400 of them or something, through our department subject pool. These were not people who had participated in my class. They were totally separate group of students. In fact, they weren’t allowed to be enrolled in an intro psych at the time. And students were assigned to either read the sort of standard book—so the OpenStax book that had none of the modifications made. Or the “modified/diversified” book, even though I don’t love that name. And then they answered a bunch of questions, as we have them do in research studies, but these ones were specifically focused on their sense of belongingness on campus.

And I was, to be quite honest, not… I wouldn’t say I was hopeful that we would see some great finding. But I was sort of ready for that to not be the case. Because in my head, you know, I think is that as an instructor and as a person in the department, that all of these changes need to be really systematic, right. Again, we can talk about OER in one classroom, but those changes, you know, are going to have longer-term impacts. Like we’re going to have to look at the effects across, like, a multi-year period of time using OER. Not just like having someone read a book for ten minutes. So I didn’t have incredibly high hopes going into it. But what we found is that, specifically first-generation students who read the diversified textbook felt like they belonged on campus more than if they read the sort of standard text. So in the standard condition, we see a belongingness gap. So students who are first generation, whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees, feel like they belong on campus less so than students whose parents do bachelor’s degrees, right. So we have this gap. When they’ve read the modified textbook, so the text that was “diversified” in some sense, that gap shrinks. It’s still present, but it’s much much smaller. So that was a really cool thing, right? Again, it wasn’t years of effort or even an entire class’s worth of effort. It was one snippet of one textbook, right. And so that was… I think a neat finding, in that it was affirming that even small changes matter. I think sometimes (myself included) we get bogged down in, “We must have all free textbooks in all classes tomorrow!” As opposed to like, “What does this allow me to do for the students that I have now, in the context that I have now?” And I think these results say that that matters. It’s certainly not the end-all be-all solution. I think we should be working towards those sorts of grander solutions. But it still was meaningful, and it still mattered, and I think that was a nice finding.

[laughter]

Josie: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So what would you recommend to people who want to take on similar projects?

Amy: I’d say, start small. The class project was wonderful. My class had 120 students. There’s no way I could’ve done it without a team of undergraduate teaching assistants helping me. So it depends very much on the context that you’re in. At the intro level, there are some interesting things that can be done. I think if we’re talking about making substantial changes to textbooks, focusing on your upper-division students might be more productive. These are students who have used textbooks for a while, right, and are imbedded in your discipline. So I think, taking appropriate-size chunks is helpful, not cold-emailing 1200 people [laughs] like I though was a solid plan. So, starting small.

Again, recognizing that the small things that you do matter. So maybe it’s that, you know, one summer you swap out some of the images in your textbook. That was one of the things I had done in the text, unrelated to either these projects. I was just sort of flipping through, and all of the images of couples were super heteronormative and super white. And so I just went to Unsplash—or one of, you know, one of the options with openly licenses photos—and put some queer people and brown people in there. That was like a really easy swap. It took me maybe an hour to do for several sections of the textbook. Again, starting small, but recognizing that those small things are still important things.

And then I think in involving students, whether that’s a lower level or the upper level, or honestly make it a project with your research lab, right. If you’re a PI or principal investigator studying the effects of a particular drug on the brain, right. A lot of the common discussions about addiction are not well-versed in science and are very blame-y of people who are struggling with addiction. And so, you know, we often think about this from a pedagogical lens, but it’s also really hard to communicate things, like your research, to a general audience, like people reading a textbook. So I think there are some unique and creative ways we can come at this problem that aren’t just class projects, or aren’t just someone laboring for an entire summer to completely revamp an entire textbook.

Josie: Yeah, and do you think that the crowdsourcing approach that you describe in your article, do you think that was successful? Would you— how would you do it differently?

Amy: It was successful in that there were some very good comments. I mean at the end of the day there was material created that would substantially improve the work. Was the cost-benefit ratio something that I would try to replicate in the past—or in the future? No. [laughter] I think, as a graduate student, and I think some now, I suffer very much from an obnoxiously gung-ho spirit that just says, “Well I want to do this, so let’s do it!” Which is good in some ways and then bad in others. I think getting some sort of internal support from organizations you want to work with is incredibly important. Like there were a lot of groups who were willing to let me send things out on their list serv. But how many emails do we get come through our list serv, right? So, you know, if you want to do a project aimed at, for instance, you know one thing that I will say the OpenStax book lacks is a chapter on gender and sexuality. It’s like a tiny section in the motivation unit? I don’t know why. Most textbooks have an entire chapter devoted to that. And so if I, as a human being—this is not me—but if I was like “Hey, I’m going to spearhead an effort to make that chapter, I think making sure that you have the buy-in of the organizations that study those things or the society for the teaching of psychology or, or whatever. I think those things are incredibly important as opposed to, trying to lone-wolf it. I think sometimes we do that a lot in OER, like, we are confronted with this massive problem. And again, maybe some—I’m not the only one with this obnoxious gung-ho spirit. [laughter] And so we try and tackle all of the problems immediately all by ourselves, and we burn out. And so I think utilizing networks that exist both in the OER space, but also trying to loop in other people, right? Other people are interested in this idea. If you want to get a researcher mad, talk to them about how their research is like misrepresented in a textbook and they will spend years [laughter] fixing the textbook, right. And so I think getting other people involved to see the benefits of these kind of things, using those networks that exist, those are important and I think will continue to be more important as we figure out what OER looks like five, ten years.

Josie: Mhmm. For sure. And do you think like having the kind of open… Hypothes.is… like anyone-can-participate method was effective? Or would you want to have it more organized in the future?

Amy: I think a little bit of both. I think I liked the idea that it was still easily accessible. Right, so I think about— Like the area that I live in right now is a very rural area. We’re about a mile away from the Yakama Indian Reservation. Lots of people have issues with internet access. Putting up a boundary… like that involves you having to fill out a really lengthy questionnaire or like propose your changes in a really formal way, is going to leave out people like tribal mental health professionals, who probably have a lot to say about where our textbook can do better. So I think… if things are added, I think they have to be done really mindfully of those other challenges that exist. And again, being conscious of not replicating the previous systems of exclusion that exist.

I think there were certainly ways I could’ve organized it better. You know, I think Hypothes.is has a lot of nifty ways of like, using hashtags or organizing material within their own systems that I could’ve used better. But again, I was one person who had never done a project like this, so I just went for it. So I think that gets back to the idea of looping in networks. Like, could I have reached out to someone at Hypothes.is and said, “Hey, can you brainstorm with me, the best way to do this?” Yes, I could’ve. No, I didn’t do that.

Josie: Right. So I guess in terms of creating new OER, what do you think is needed so that those projects consider diversity and representation from the very beginning?

Amy: Pay people who are not just cis straight white dudes to help you with the effort. That sounds very simple, and I don’t necessarily mean it that way. I think it really gets back to the idea of, who are we asking to be important enough to work on these kinds of projects? Because that’s really what we do when we create textbooks, or even when we decide what we’re including in textbooks. We are making value decisions about who should count as “fancy” or “important enough” to be doing this work. And so I think from the very beginning, it has to be inclusive in terms of who’s working on the project. And I very much— I want to be very clear, that I do not mean you should harass Black and Brown scholars to do free work for you, and then like give them a brief acknowledgement section. It has to be diverse in terms of the team, but it also has to be— It can’t be just replicating hierarchical approaches. So I think that’s step one.

I think step two, you know there has to be consideration of all elements of the textbook process. So I think… Sometimes… If I say “diversification”—which again, I don’t love the word but I seem to have sunk myself in a hole of using it a lot—of a textbook, some people might just mean, “Oh, I just need to make the pictures, you know, less just white people.” Which is a good thing, but also whose research are you talking about, right? There’s been studies done looking at doing very systematic studies of like whose research is talked about in various textbooks: overwhelmingly white men. Which is not surprising, but you can’t just put pictures of— You know, if you’re talking all about the work of men and then you have some pictures of women doing science, that’s not helpful. Like you’re still codifying this idea of “Men are scientists” and they’re important enough to do the work. So, it has to be about content, it has to be about graphics, it has to be about the process. Like, it has to be about at all. If you’re doing the project on the beginning, don’t make it so in three years, someone else to come along and do a diversification project, right. [laughter].

And it’s going to be hard. Like, I think it’s not an easy process, trying to change fundamentally how we treat knowledge. That’s what we’re doing or at least it’s my head what we should be doing. For a lot of us there are 25 years of schooling engrained in our head about, “This is who is smart, and this is what counts.” And so bucking that, or working against that, is a lot of un-training our brains, and that’s hard work. And so, I guess I just, I don’t want— I made a joke in the beginning of this, but, I don’t want to take it lightly that it’s something that’s super easy to do. But it has to be done, like period. At the end of the day, it has to be done.

[Theme music]

Josie: If you want to check out Amy’s research on open education and the diversification project in particular, I’ve linked to her research page in the show notes. You can also connect with her on Twitter at @Amy_Nusbaum and Nusbaum is spelled N-U-S-B-A-U-M.

You can learn more about this podcast at knowledgespectrums.opened.ca. On the website, you can find all episodes and transcripts, along with many other resources and information related to this project.

You can connect with me on Twitter @josiea_g and you can tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #OKSPodcast.

I record this podcast on the traditional and unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, now known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, and the territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples.

The theme song is “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

This episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. So you are welcome to share and remix the episode, as long as you give credit, provide a link back to the original source, and share any remixed work under the same license.

This has been Open Knowledge Spectrums Podcast. Thanks for listening.

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• Epistemic Violence Transcript [Word]
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[Theme music: “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org]

Josie Gray: Hello! Welcome to the Open Knowledge Spectrums podcast, which explores questions of epistemic justice, or knowledge equity, in the context of open education and considers different possibilities for making open education and open educational practices more equitable.

My name is Josie Gray, and I am your host. This podcast is my final project for my Masters of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Tadashi Dozono. Tadashi Dozono is an assistant professor of history/social science education at California State University Channel Islands. Through cultural studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, and critical theory, Tadashi’s research emphasizes accountability towards the experiences of marginalized students by examining the production of knowledge in high school social studies classrooms. His work draws on his experiences as a queer Japanese American cis-male, his family’s internment during World War II, and over twelve years of teaching in New York City public schools. He received his PhD in social and cultural studies from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, where his dissertation focused on “trouble-maker” students of colour in world history classrooms. Tadashi applied his dissertation findings by returning to teach in Brooklyn, NY, at a small public school focused on restorative justice. His research has been published in journals such as Race, Ethnicity and Education, Educational Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and The History Teacher.

I found Tadashi’s work when I was doing research on inclusion and representation in curriculum. A lot of the articles I was reading were using quantitative approaches, like basically counting the number of times specific groups of people or individuals appeared in a text to evaluate who was being included and in what chapters. However, they weren’t really looking at the quality of that representation. But in contrast, Tadashi’s work was really digging into the layers of representation and uncovering how white supremacy was functioning at the level of language in world history curriculum.

So in this episode, I talk with Tadashi about epistemic violence in world history curriculum. We talk about textbooks, standardized curriculum, queer theory, the power of grammar, and allowing students to bring their own ways of knowing into the classroom.

Hope you enjoy.

[Theme music]

Josie: I think it’s.. Yep, looks like it’s going. So to start, I was wondering if you could share a bit about your background, as a person, as a teacher, as a researcher?

Dr. Tadashi Dozono: So I’m Japanese American, grew up in Portland, Oregon, and I identify as queer cis male. And I taught in New Your City from like early 2000s to just like a couple years ago, until 2019. And I did my PhD work, kind of course work right kind of in the middle of that and finished doing dissertation writing while continuing to teach in New York City. And then now currently, I teach at Cal State University Channel Islands, just about an hour north of LA. Yeah.

And kind of teaching wise, I always taught high school social studies. For most of the time taught ninth grade world history, but also taught nine through twelfth grade U.S. history, civics, economics, and world history.

Josie: Great. And what brought you to work on epistemic injustice in world history curriculum?

Tadashi: I guess a lot of it was through my years of teaching in New York City, teaching world history to ninth graders, and almost all of the students are/were Black and Latino, and just knowing after years of teaching them, just how they ended up like seeing themselves or not seeing themselves in the world history curriculum.

And I think in a lot of ways that reflected my own experiences in K to 12 schools, of not feeling like there was room in history classes for my background in history. Yeah. I mean, a lot of.. A lot of why I ended up going into teaching was because of experiences of racism that I had had growing up. And so it was kind of— I guess teaching was my way of dealing with racism, as my way to sort of create change around that. And I guess going into doing research on this stuff was my way of kind of further processing that. And figuring out— I guess even though I had been trying to change the narrative of world history to be more inclusive of my students’ backgrounds, they still felt overall excluded from the narrative. And so.. As a teacher, that felt frustrating to feel like, I’m trying to make these changes but it’s not really— it’s not doing the sort of change I intended it to. And so, going into researching this stuff was trying to figure out, okay, what else needs to happen? Like besides— You know, I think the content— changing the content is important, but what else is going on here besides just changing, you know, the places that are included in the narrative of world history?

Josie: Yeah. Absolutely. Could you maybe talk about some the research that you have done? Like general overview?

Tadashi: Yeah. I mean I guess my PhD dissertation work was then focused on interviewing high school students of colour—pretty much all like Black and Latinx students—10th graders in world history classrooms. And then trying to really document their experiences and their relationships to world history. And so it was kind of building off of what I had seen in my students as a teacher, and then.. then going back into classrooms to try to document those experiences of different students in like urban classroom settings. And so I guess in terms of my research, part of it’s like documenting those experiences that students have and their relationships to make teachers and researchers more aware of that sense of, you know, ways that students can feel like unseen or negated through the curriculum.

And then part of my work is also then looking at curriculum—often world history curriculum, like textbooks, or state standards, or curriculum units—and trying to look at, okay, what’s problematic about these? Like where— what could change in how these are structured. Cause I think oftentimes the people creating curriculum, I believe that they are trying to do a good job of being more inclusive. But there are still these sort of issues, right. So part of my work comes from this sense of like, I know that I as a teacher had good intentions of changing the curriculum for my students but it still— it’s like, what’s that something else that’s still missing that’s not creating that change that I want it to? And then I guess, yeah I end up doing a lot of theory work to kind of— I guess it’s trying to get to the foundations. Like what are the underlying things going on beyond just the surface of like, this looks like an inclusive narrative, but then what’s actually going on underneath?

Josie: For sure, absolutely. And so, I guess you were just talking about like recognizing that people come into this with good intentions, but even with those good intentions, there’s still some— there’s a gap there. And so where do you think that gap is? Is it kind of— Cause it’s not— You’re right, it’s not just curriculum. It’s also the teacher, and how it’s taught, and how students are brought in. Could you maybe talk about that?

Tadashi: So to some extent, I think, another layer of these tensions is how student thinking comes into play. I guess overall I think a lot about the idea of like knowledge production and the relations of knowledge production in the classroom. I guess I think about like, what’s the relationship between like students and the teacher and the text in the classroom? You know, okay, so if we just take the text itself, like the textbook or something. What went into producing that kind of set of knowledge that’s there? Right? And then I also try to think about, in terms of students, what’s the knowledge that students are bringing into the classroom, and how can that knowledge be incorporated into the overall kind of system of producing knowledge in the classroom. And then the teacher as well, right? What role does the teacher play in that in terms of kind of taking authority of themselves as the “expert” or kind of putting the expertise in the books that they are reading or the expertise in the students, right? And their ability to listen to what students are saying.

So to some extent I— through my work with interviewing students, I really try to think about, okay, what’s all the thinking going on with that students are saying? Beyond just, is this a right answer or a wrong answer? What are the things going on into their thinking behind that, right? And to.. To have the ways that students are thinking about history and world history to be just as interesting as what’s in the textbook itself. So I think part of my goal is to get teachers to be really attentive to the ways that students are thinking about the world and to have that be just as important as the history that the world history textbook is presenting.

Josie: Right. And I was wondering if you could talk about, like how you do that in a context there’s this state-mandated curriculum with exams that students have to take. Like how do you do that kind of teaching with those structures being imposed?

Tadashi: Yeah with this I guess I’m thinking about this more from my own experiences as a high school teacher, and then also presenting this as like a possible solution for like other teachers to.. I guess to find the ways to subvert the state standards, kind of openings in the state standards. Like so for example, on the New York State exam, there would be these thematic questions about world history. And so they don’t— They suggest some examples of cases that you could use. So I would often try to take those themes and think about other examples that could be used that are not necessarily like in the traditional history textbook, right. So for example like, thinking about like Jamaican Maroons, Maroon communities, as an example as kind of revolution or protest, right? So thinking about like cases that might relate more to my students from the Caribbean and a New York City classroom, but that are not talked about much in the New York City textbook. Yeah. I guess it’s like trying to find those openings in the ways that you can—You can use the sort of bigger questions or themes and then find, you know, ways to incorporate different content into that.

Josie: Right. Absolutely. I guess that leads into another question that I have. My work life is very focused on textbooks [laughs], but I’m like fully aware that textbooks can be super limiting. So could you may talk about like, how do you feel about textbooks? And do you use them? Are they ever useful to you?

Tadashi: Yeah. It’s— I think textbooks are definitely useful.. In some ways I kind of think about them kind of like, something like Wikipedia, where it’s like a really good starting point, and it’s useful, but then it’s kind of moving from the sort of like kind of background knowledge, narrative foundation that the textbook might provide and then.. then going into much more critical like depth of looking at primary sources and— I mean I think it would be great to do some analysis of what is going on in the textbook. So to get students to do kind of discourse analysis of like, okay, how is this narrative being constructed? Like what’s missing? What language is being used about certain groups and not being used around others. So I think it would be great for teachers to use those issues around textbooks as a way to also study it as a text itself and to be critical about that text. Yeah. So I mean I think— I definitely use textbooks as a teacher. You know, I will still use certain kind of base-narrative texts in my own classrooms, but then thinking of that as just the beginning point and then doing inquiry from there.

Josie: Right. Using textbooks as a tool to give students the abilities to kind of analyze like, what’s the narrative here? And be more critical about it rather than presenting it as this like “master narrative.”

Tadashi: And I think— I guess with my own work, I think it’s important to do the critiques of the textbooks, but then I also— I guess just for myself, I try to make sure that I’m doing a sort of balance of looking at like the problems that can be in textbooks but be also solutions oriented. Right, so what would alternatives look like? And trying to look at models of that or examples of alternatives to using the textbook or ways to extend past just using the textbooks.

Josie: Yeah. I know that’s a question that I have, it’s like whether textbooks, just in the way that they’re designed, whether they could every really be epistemically just? Or whether they could include multiple ways of knowing, like that’s a question I have about textbooks, is whether that’s possible based on how they are designed. Or if kind of new designs need to be imagined. Yeah, I don’t know the answer, but something that I’ve been thinking about for sure.

Tadashi: Yeah, and I guess kind of—I mean I think, I think one of the big tensions I have with textbooks is the presentation of “objective” knowledge. I think it’s important for the textbook and the teacher to be honest about, this is presenting as objective, but there’s inevitably some sort of bias and ideological influence going into how this narrative is being presented. So I think either the textbooks being upfront about that bias or the teacher helping students to unpack that bias and perspective that is there.

Josie: Yeah, absolutely. I’m trying to find a quote of one of your articles that I pulled out… MM okay, there is a quote that went, “The promotion of ‘normal’ and ‘traditional’ curriculum is just as political as those deemed radical or politically motivated.” And I think that kind of speaks to what you were just saying, like claiming objectivity with a certain narrative is a political act even though it’s been kind of depoliticized by European ways of knowing or, you know.

So you write a lot about epistemic violence. Could you talk a little bit about how you define the term and maybe an example of what that looks like?

Tadashi: Epistemic violence is— it’s basically when the ways that people understand the world and makes sense of the world, when those ways of knowing are negated or ignored. It’s like when you deem someone’s way of making sense of the world as illegitimate, it’s really—in a big way, especially in terms of world history, it’s a way of dehumanizing people, of kind of taking away that part of their humanity. And I think in terms of world history, a big component of how being human is defined is that capacity to reason, and so when you take away the legitimacy of a group of people’s capacity to reason, then that’s an act of dehumanization. And so to a large extent that’s why I frame it through this term of violence. We often think of violence as these physical acts of harm. So I use the term violence here to point to the way that like words can do harm and words can be an act in themselves. And so to make that sort of judgement of whether someone’s way of knowing counts or not, to me it’s important, especially in schools, to understand that as a form of epistemic violence.

Josie: Right. And with you talking about language, in one of your articles you really get into the language and grammar and look at how those are used to reinforce white supremacy in grade 10 world history curriculum. So could you talk about some of the ways that white supremacy functions at the level of language?

Tadashi: Yeah, so it’s interesting because I— I think, partly I never really thought of myself as being a good student in English classes, and you know, I think I always thought that I was interpreting the text wrong, and things like that. But I’ve gotten really interested in the idea of grammar overall as really this representation of relationships of power. You know, it’s— Just the idea of who is the subject in the sentence and who’s the object in the sentence? And just doing some analysis around, you know, who gets to be a subject, who gets to be an actor in history versus who is the object, who is acted upon, I think really then opens up these power dynamics that can go kind of unnoticed. But they’re really king of these powerful structures at the sentence level in these texts, right. And so— Yeah, and I guess beyond just sort of object/subject, there is also who then is being seen as passive? Or who has agency? You know, often times non-white peoples in world history are included only once they are acted upon. They become a part of history once Europe has had contact with them. And then they enter history. And often times, the events are only remarkable as a sort of reaction to something that Europe has done. If it’s a revolt or something. Like the Haitian revolution is remarkable only in terms of being a, both an example of kind of redoing what Europeans were doing in terms of political revolutions, but then also sort of like repeating that action. But then also only in response to France’s actions. So yeah, so I think we can see these power dynamics at the sentence level in a lot of these texts.

Josie: Yeah, and I think like one of the examples that really illustrated it for me is where you talked about how passive voice functions both to remove the responsibility, or the— Yeah to downplay European or white actors that are often doing the violence and doing the dispossession and all those things, and how using passive voice means you don’t have to say who did those things. And then also how passive voice, like the same tool, is used to remove agency. Like it’s insidious the ways some of these things work.

Tadashi: Yeah, and that— that was an interesting process for me in my analysis, because I think initially, in doing my analysis of the state framework, was noticing those moments when the passive voice was used to kind of make non-white peoples objects being acted upon and then I started notice this other dynamic of, oh, the passive voice is still being used for like white Europeans’ actions. And so it was really trying to figure out, oh, but there’s still this significant difference in how that passive voice functions. So it was an interesting process for me to figure out for myself what that meant, how the passive voice was being used differently. And it read very differently for me. I was reacting to that difference in the passive voice.

Josie: Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. I have an undergraduate degree in history, so— like history is very interesting to me, and how history is studied is very interesting. And you’re talking about how like history is periodized. Like all these frameworks that are “history,” how these come from a European tradition and are then imposed through all of history curriculum. And it trickles down through all of these levels. Even at the university level, a lot of these things that you have identified still exist, like these historical claims of objectivity and this periodization, like what kind of courses get offered and who teaches them.

Tadashi: Yeah. I guess along those lines, like, thinking about what epistemic violence can look like in curriculum is—Like I’ve been recently doing work at looking at like Indigenous belief systems in the curriculum, and a big tension that comes up with that is, you know, there might be room for Indigenous knowledge to be studied as an object of study, but not being acknowledged as having their own way of making sense of the world. So just the terms that are being used to study the knowledge of other people, it still takes the methods and the perspective of western science to then make sense of that and to make it intelligible. And otherwise it’s just sort of like “culture” that we can study versus its own legitimate way of understanding the world and knowing. And so I think that’s a way where epistemic violence can— it can have this appearance of like, oh this culture is being valued. But in actuality, it’s still being objectified. Yeah, it’s not being valued as its own legitimate system of reasoning.

Josie: Right, yeah, absolutely. This is another quote that I pulled from your article, which—and you said, “The goal isn’t simply to have marginalized people mentioned more often. Educators must always be attentive to how power shapes discourse.” And I think that really applies to what you were saying there. Like the goal is not just to talk about Indigenous knowledge systems. The goal is to value those as own knowledge systems equivalent to other knowledge systems and actually change how we think about knowledge and education, and all of those things.

Tadashi: Yeah. And along with that is— I think even in my early attempts to study world history on my own I would often still read, you know, books about Africa or China or the Middle East by white scholars. And then.. I think then at some point there was a shift for me of then trying to focus on reading texts about other places by people from those places. And you know, that’s not to say that scholars who are white who are writing about those places aren’t valuable, but it was to acknowledge that there’s this sort of difference in where the authors are coming from. Yeah just the approach that content ends up being different and the way it’s being presented is somewhat different.

Josie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, reading some of your research I see you doing that, like kind of acknowledging your positionality and where you’re coming from and being transparent about your identity and how that affects the work that you do. So could you maybe talk more about how positionality of an author and who is being cited and all of those things play into epistemic justice?

Tadashi: Yeah, I think.. I mean I think the idea of positionality.. To some extent I think that became important to me in a lot of ways through my students in New York in my first couple years of teaching. I think I learned humility pretty fast in teaching high school. And that it’s better to acknowledge those differences between me and my students than to make it seem like I know what they are talking about or I know what they’ve gone through. And so I think— I mean I think a big piece of that was like, having always identified as a person of colour, and then having my students point out that in their eyes, I’m not a person of colour because I, you know. And to acknowledge that my experiences growing up as Japanese American in Portland, Oregon, is so vastly different than my students growing up in New York City who like, grew up as Black and Latinx. And that even though I see a commonality there, there is still a big difference there.

Yeah, I mean I think.. in terms of positionality, it’s kind of— an important piece of that is having a humility about the limitations of, you know, I’m not going to claim that I can understand this fully, or you know to, to acknowledge that perspective. And I guess that kind of comes to, like comes back to that conversation about textbooks. Like, you know, if I expect the textbooks to be honest about the perspective that they’re coming from and the bias that is inherent in those textbooks, I think it is important to be upfront about how where I’m coming from in my approach to writing of my research.

Yeah, and you know, that does play a role in who I end up citing in my papers as well. You know, I appreciate these sort of movements around citational practices. Things like movements to cite Black women. And that idea of, you know, what lineage are you creating in your work? And who are you placing at the, kind of at the origin of knowledge for your work? You know, to me that speaks a lot of that idea of epistemic injustices is, you know, is the origin of all knowledge in Europe at all times versus changing citational practices and changing those lineages to be able to trace back to other locations beyond Europe. And I think there is, built into academia, there’s an expectation of who you cite. And you know, in the publishing process being told that I need to cite certain people. And that, you know, and that really becomes— it just kind of becomes this reproduction of lineages that will remain white if we just kind of continue those practices. So that— That’s kind of this other way that white supremacy can kind of become reproduced in the writing up of research is the expectation of who gets cited, how you’re tracing knowledge, often it ends up being tracing it back to Europe.

Josie: Yeah, for sure. Yeah I’ve been doing a lot of think about these kind of things.. for this project in particular and thinking about like how to acknowledge my own positionality, which I— like as a white cis woman doing—like talking— trying to talk about epistemic injustice feels really important. And like be transparent about that subjectivity.

I’d love to talk about queer theory, because queer theory is something that I am very new to. So I was wondering if you could maybe give like a brief introduction to the field and talk about how queer theory connects to questions of epistemic justice?

Tadashi: Yeah so, queer theory for me.. I guess even like, starting from this sort of like.. Cause I think the idea of theory can often be this sort of big word that’s intimidating. But I think.. I think at the end of the day like, one thing I try to emphasize in my work is that the idea of theory is really— it’s one way of trying to make sense of the world. And I think for marginalized groups, one has to always try to make sense of the world in a way that’s different than how it’s been presented to you to understand yourself other than being sort of at the margins of society. And so I think.. I approach theory as not so much the sort of like realm of kind of dead white men philosophers but really to acknowledge the ways that people who are marginalized try to make sense of their position in the world and that marginalized people are theorizing daily and having to recalibrate like, their position in the world and society.

And so I think for me, queer theory stems from.. Or I guess my relationship to queer theory stems from like my own experiences of growing up feeling like being gay was bad. And then really kind of through college, being able to read texts that were affirming of who I am and flipping that relationship of, you know, it’s not me that’s the problem, it’s society that has the problem of having a limited sense of who is legitimate and why. And so I think kind of that experience of getting to a point of self-validation is a lot of how I relate to queer theory.

So I think overall, queer theory is this sort of critique of power dynamics and of the power that the idea of “normal,” critiquing how much power that category has in our society. Cause when you have this category of “normal,” that means you have the category of “abnormal,” and the category of “queer” as kind of strange. And so really queer theory is that sort of like reclaiming of that space of being kind of strange or queer and really kind of flipping those power dynamics.

And so, in terms of epistemic justice, queer theory is playing that role of kind of flipping that relationship of what is seen as the sort of normal and status quo way of knowing things to then consider what’s in this other realm of these other ways of knowing that have been deemed as illegitimate, as subordinate to the dominate ways of knowing.

Josie: Right, so it’s kind of this practice of flipping those expectations and like the narratives that we’re told about what is normal and what isn’t. So I guess then queer theory is applicable much broader than just the fields of gender and sexuality, like it can be used in other contexts, is that right?

Tadashi: Yeah, and I guess queer theory ends up also critiquing sort of inclusive models as well a lot of times. I think kind of a good example that I use to help understand this is like, like the idea of gay marriage is more of a normative.. kind of assimilating into the mainstream by adding gay people into the system of marriage. And the sort of queer critique of marriage is more like, why would I want to be part of a club that didn’t want me in there to begin with? And why would I want to be part of a system that has been known for excluding others or also has strong roots in kind of placing women as objects of property. And it is sort of, instead of trying to be included into the norm, it’s critiquing that power of that idea of normal and like let’s get rid of that category.

Josie: Yeah that makes me think a lot of Sasha Costanza-Chock’s work on design justice. They write about, in the book, about their experiences as a trans femme person going through airport security and being flagged every time they go through because they don’t conform to male and female.. like norms of what a body is supposed to be. And they talk about how design justice isn’t about making a more inclusive airport security, it’s about like taking down those systems of surveillance and all of those things. It’s kind of like breaking down those systems, not just trying to be included in those systems that cause a lot of harm.

Tadashi: Yeah and I think kind of as a high school teacher I think I often would link queer theory with like critical disability studies and the ways that my students were being categorized based on their learning styles and the ways that they think and process things. Yeah, like categories of able-bodied and normal versus, you know, abnormal ways of thinking or being then become this other category, right. So trying to dismantle what that idea of what the normal child is or the normal functional body and mind, you know, instead of trying to get students to, you know, be able to fit into that category, well let’s question what that category is and what it’s actually doing.

Josie: Right, absolutely. So I guess maybe you could talk a little bit about.. I think you kind of did there, but how epistemic justice shows up in your teaching practices? Both maybe in the K to 12 level but also in the university system?

Tadashi: Yeah and you know and cause like we kind of started talking about like textbooks, but I think at the end of the day, like I don’t care so much about the textbook. What I care about is the students and their sense of themselves and their education. And so I think that idea of epistemic injustice really comes down to, what’s going to help my students.. I don’t know, like just have confidence in who they are and in how they think about the world. And you know, to continually push them, but to.. You know, I guess my concern is really about the students and how they understand themselves. And so I think a big part of how it comes up in my classroom is— I guess even like K to 12, is to break down the idea of what being smart is. Or you know, trying to move it past the sort of like, this innate inborn capacity and, you know, that the grade means— You know, like I was always really so bothered when students would have this sense of like, “Oh, I failed this class. That means I’m stupid.” And when a lot of times there were all these other factors that were impacting the work that they were turning in or not turning in to the classroom, to the teacher.

So I think, like in my work now with teaching elementary school teachers how to teach social studies, I’d say a big component of the work that I do with that is kind of repairing students’ relationships to what economics is, government, geography, history. I think a lot of my future elementary school teachers come in with kind of like a bad relationship to some of those things. Like economics feels intimidating. And I think a lot of my work there is trying to break it down to both to acknowledge their relationships to those disciplines and to really broaden the definitions of what those mean, right. That economics is really about resources and how we distribute resources and so that can be as simple as, you know, like having like a bag of candy and how we divide it amongst everyone in the class. So really trying to break some of those ideas down to their kind of core concepts. So I think like a chunk of that is kind of repairing students’ relationships to those disciplines and to really kind of broaden what counts as knowledge in all of those disciplines, and to really engage students’ own background knowledge as a part of those disciplines, cause often times they are not seen as that. So a big part of it is like encouraging my future teacher students to really try and incorporate like the knowledge that their students have as a part of that process of learning in the classroom.

Josie: Yeah, absolutely. So where do you see a potential to disrupt epistemic injustice and epistemic violence in world history education?

Tadashi: I think an important component of that is to trust teachers and to provide teachers with the time and the resources to develop curriculum and adapt curriculum. Because I think localizing the learning is really important for teachers to be able to incorporate not just the background knowledge of their students but also of the communities in which the schools are embedded and the students are embedded. And, you know, that takes time and resources to be able to learn the histories of the communities and to incorporate those in. And I think— I think that’s where the learning just reaches new levels of depth and richness when the knowledge is able to be localized and embedded within students’ communities. So I think a big piece of that is really entrusting teachers with, you know, so not just, “This is the state curriculum and you have to teach exactly what this says,” to “Okay, here’s this sort of beginning point of state curriculum, and let’s also make sure that we’re trusting teachers to be able to develop curriculum or expand on the curriculum to really figure out ways to link students’ lives and their communities to these state standards and the state curriculum, or right. Or even just go beyond what the state curriculum says [laughs].

Josie: [Laughs] Absolutely.

[Theme music: “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org]

Josie: If you are interested in learning more about Tadashi’s work, I’ve linked a number of his articles in the show notes. That is also where you can find links to resources about other topics covered in this episode.

You can learn more about this podcast at knowledgespectrums.opened.ca. On the website, you can find all episodes and transcripts, along with many other resources and information related to this project.

You can connect with me on Twitter @josiea_g and you can tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #OKSPodcast.

I record this podcast on the traditional and unceeded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, and the territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. I am very grateful to live on these territories, and working to learn and enact my responsibilities as an uninvited settler here.

The theme song is “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

This episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. So you are welcome to share and remix the episode, as long as you give credit, provide a link back to the original source, and share any remixed work under the same license.

This has been Open Knowledge Spectrums. Thanks for listening.

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• Introducing Open Knowledge Spectrums Transcript [Word]
• Introducing Open Knowledge Spectrums Transcript [PDF]

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[Theme music: “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org]

Josie Gray: Welcome to the Open Knowledge Spectrums podcast, which explores questions of epistemic justice, or knowledge equity, in the context of open education and considers different possibilities for making open education and open educational practices more equitable.

My name is Josie Gray, and I am your host. This podcast is my final project for my Masters of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

This podcast is an interview podcast, but this first episode is going to be just me. I am going to introduce and situate myself and this project, explore some of the key concepts that guided this project, and share a few teasers about what to expect from future episodes.

[Theme music]

Josie: To start, I would like to situate myself. I am an accessible open publishing practitioner who is trying to figure out what it means to be an inclusive designer. I am interested in the balance between print and digital design from an accessibility perspective, feminist approaches to publishing, and what lies beyond providing “access” to information.

I am a white able-bodied bisexual cisgender woman in my mid-20s. I am a settler of mixed European ancestry, and my family and ancestors have lived uninvited on the lands of Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island for over 150 years. I grew up on unceded Tsimshian territory on the northwest coast, around the ocean, the mountains, and beautiful rain forests. I also have ties to Treaty 6 territory, where most of my extended family lives. Growing up, I spent a lot of summers on my maternal grandparents’ farm, which is on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot, Tsuu T’ina, Sioux, Metis, and Cree Peoples. Currently, I live, work, and learn on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, and the territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. I have been an uninvited resident on these lands for over seven years. It is where I completed my undergraduate degree and where I started my work in open education for BCcampus. I am extremely grateful for the privilege I have had to live and learn in each of these places.

I am feminist, although I have only started to align myself with that term in the last few years. I am still learning, but my feminism is trans inclusive and intersectional. And when I say that, I think it’s important to recognize that the term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to push back against the erasure of Black women’s experiences of racial and gender discrimination in feminist and anti-racist movements and in anti-discrimination legal frameworks, which tend to focus on the most privileged of those groups, that being white women and Black men. The concept of intersectionality illustrates that people have complex and intersecting identities that influence their experience of race, gender, and class-based discrimination. You can’t look at just race or just gender.

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Victoria. This podcast and the accompanying website is in partial fulfillment of my Master of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

I work for BCcampus in Victoria, British Columbia, where I manage the B.C. Open Textbook Collection, support OER publishing projects, and provide training and support for B.C. faculty publishing open textbooks. I have also been learning about and supporting accessibility in the context of open educational resources since 2016.

I share all of these things so explicitly because I am very aware of the many privileges I hold and the context I am working from, and I think it is important to name those things. All of these things impact how I see and interact with the world and how the world interacts with me. And they also have influenced my approach to this project in ways that I am aware of and also probably in ways that I am oblivious to.

With that, let’s jump into the two big ideas that guide this project. The first is open education.

[Theme music]

Josie: The word “open” is a huge word that encompasses so many different things depending on the context. It is often used to mean public, transparent, free, and/or accessible, and it is often used to describe more equitable institutional and research processes and practices, like open access, open data, open science, open source, open government, etc. But this project focuses on open education specifically.

In education, there are again many ways openness is understood and enacted. But one common goal is to create a more inclusive and accessible education system by thinking about knowledge through this framework of openness. Instead of bundling up knowledge in an expensive textbook or putting it behind a paywall, open education sees knowledge as a public good that should be freely available to everyone to learn from, build on, and customize for their own purposes.

One example of openness is education is the replacement of traditional commercial, all rights reserved textbooks with open educational resources (OER). OER are any kind of resource used for teaching and learning—so for example, textbooks, syllabuses, videos, test banks—that are in the public domain or under an open licence (such as a Creative Commons licence), which allows others to use, edit, remix, and redistribute the content for free—all without needing to ask for permission from the original author.

In addition to OER, open education is explored through the lens of open pedagogy, or how openness shows up in teaching practices. Open pedagogy is a much harder term to define, and it’s one that I am less familiar with. And it means different things to  different people, and it looks different in different contexts. Open pedagogy often aims to put students in the seat of knowledge producers, rather than knowledge consumers, and make them active participants in the learning process. If you want to explore all of the nuances of open pedagogy, I would recommend going over to the Open Pedagogy Notebook at openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/ and read the exploration of the complexities of the term written by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa.

One important thing to note is that openness on its own isn’t an objective good, which I’ll talk more about in a few minutes.

Now let’s talk about the next big idea of this project: epistemic justice. Epistemic justice looks at justice as it relates to knowledge. It asks things like, Whose knowledge is seen as valid and valuable? Whose stories get told? From what perspectives? Who gets to create knowledge? How are different people represented? And why?

Epistemic justice as a defined term can be credited to Miranda Fricker’s 2007 book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. However, feminist and critical race scholars have been talking about justice and injustice as it relates to knowledge long before that.

For example, in Teaching to Transgress, published in 1994, bell hooks reflected on the emergence of the idea of “cultural diversity” in education, and how much hope there was that this framework would help bring change in an institution filled with “biases that uphold and maintain white supremacy, imperialism, sexism, and racism” (p. 29). She goes on to write:

When everyone first began to speak about cultural diversity, it was exciting. For those of us on the margins (people of color, folks from working class backgrounds, gays, and lesbians, and so on) who had always felt ambivalent about our presence in institutions where knowledge was shared in ways that reinscribed colonialism and domination, it was thrilling to think that the vision of justice and democracy that was at the very heart of the civil rights movement would be realized in the academy. At last, there was the possibility of a learning community, a place where difference could be acknowledged, where we would finally all understand, accept, and affirm that our ways of knowing are forged in history and relations of power. Finally, we were all going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral (p. 30).

Although hooks was not using the term “epistemic justice,” she was talking about the same concept, the awareness of how the construction of what counts as “knowledge,” and the depoliticization of teaching, causes harm and reifies the systems of domination in our society.

Another example is Charles W. Mills, who developed the concept of “white ignorance.” This idea was first published in the late 1990s, and it looks at ignorance that is specifically driven by racism and white supremacy. Mills discusses many ways that white ignorance allows white people (although Mills acknowledges that white ignorance can affect non-white people, too) to remain oblivious to how race functions in our society. Mills discusses how “white normativity” and then “color blindness” were constructed to allow for “the centering of the Euro and later Euro-American reference group as constitutive norm.”

The specific part of Mills work that I want to highlight is the section he dedicates to discussing how social memory is constructed and curated through things like textbooks, ceremonies, official holidays, and monuments. In particular, Mills cites researchers who demonstrate how standard American history textbooks have allowed white ignorance to be perpetuated in the school system by downplaying and “whitewashing” the realities of slavery and colonization. The erasure and suppression of this history “enables a self-representation in which differential white privilege, and the need to correct for it, does not exist” (p. 31).

Epistemic justice recognizes that knowledge is cultural, subjective, contextual, and diverse. Knowledge has power, and how we treat, share, and construct what we consider knowledge can be empowering, but it can also do harm. For open education to be a tool for justice, we must critically evaluate it through this lens.

For example, while openness can improve access to knowledge, it can also reproduce inequities found in academia and our larger society by centring Eurocentric, colonial narratives and ways of knowing. If the same people who were writing commercial textbooks are the same people writing open textbooks, we are not democratizing knowledge production. If Black, Indigenous, and students of colour, queer and trans students, poor and working-class students do not see themselves and their communities in open content, we are not creating resources that are inclusive and useful. If disabled students and students with limited access to Internet and devices cannot access and engage with open content, that content is not accessible.

We also have to consider open licences and recognize that these licenses operate in a western, colonial understanding of intellectual properly that is not culturally appropriate for many Indigenous ways of knowing (Young-ing, 2006; Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., 2019). In addition, copyright as a legal framework has been used to dispossess and appropriate the intellectual and cultural products of Black and Indigenous peoples (Greene, 2019). As such, not all knowledge can or should be open, and there are harmful histories that need to be acknowledged.

So these questions and these issues are some of the things that this podcast aims to explore.

[Theme music]

Josie: But, why do a podcast? I mentioned at the beginning that I am a feminist, and for me, I see podcasting as well aligned with feminist praxis. Praxis is the process of taking theory and putting it into practice. So much of my understanding of podcasting and feminism developed from listening to feminist podcasters like Dr. Hannah McGregor on Secret Feminist Agenda and Sandy Hudson and Nora Loreto on Sandy and Nora Talk Politics who practice public-facing, community-engaged work outside the bounds of media and academic institutions. As such, I see feminism and podcasting as tightly connected.

For one, podcasting is one way to make academic work more accessible. When people talk, they are more likely to use everyday language. In addition, podcasting is meant to be public. I don’t think you can call something a podcast if you don’t share it. And it allows you to easily distribute audio content on the open web, so anyone with a device and internet can access it. With that publicness comes increased visibility and accountability for the work that you do. I also am making sure that transcripts go live at the same time as the audio to give people options in how they engage with content: You can read, you can listen, or you can do both depending on your ability, your preference, and your context.

In the open education community that I am embedded in, people do so much of their work in the open through podcasting, blogging, tweeting, and other means of public engagement, and I have learned so much from them. So I see this project as kind of following in their footsteps by designing it to live online, to be easily shared, to not (just) sit in an institutional repository, and to also pass on the tools and resources I used to create the podcast for others wanting to do similar work.

And finally, podcasting can also be a way to practice epistemic justice. It allows people to share their experiences, and their research, and their perspectives in their own voice, rather than being mediated through a researcher. And of course, podcasting is an excuse to connect with smart and interesting people while also encouraging a high degree of care and attention when engaging with their work in order to talk with them about it.

Voice, care, accessibility, and accountability are all things that I associate with feminism, and for me, podcasting is one way those things can be put into practice.

[Theme music]

Now I’ll provide a brief intro to each of the episodes that will be released over the next few weeks.

In the first episode, Tadashi talks about his research on epistemic violence in grade 10 New York state world history curriculum. Tadashi looks at how white supremacy functions in this curriculum at the level of language, and how harmful that can be for student of colour. For example, his research looks at silence, or what is not talked about in curriculum, and looks at the use of passive voice, which is used both to obscure the harms of colonial actors and to remove the agency of marginalized peoples.

In this episode, I talk with Amy about projects she has led to leverage the permissions of open licenses and adapt an introduction to psychology open textbook to make it more inclusive. She shares a project that she ran with her students to customize the textbook to their local context, and also broader initiative where she leveraged open tools to crowd-source the evaluation of the textbook through the lens of diversity, representation, and inclusion.

In the next episode, I talk with Apurva and Zoe about collaborative models for open publishing. They share the work that the Rebus Community is doing to support more collaborative, open, and transparent approaches to OER creation. We discuss some of the ethical and equity considerations that relate to open publishing, the work that goes into successful collaborations, and the power of publishing.

In the next episode, I talk with three other second year inclusive design students that are in my cohort. They share about their own major research projects and discuss various challenges and positive experiences they’ve had in the education system. We talk about openness, inclusion, and opportunities for doing and thinking about things differently.

In this episode, I talk with Arley and Samantha about their experiences as physically disabled instructors and where they see the potential for disability to be a positive disrupter in open education spaces and for students. We discuss the value of difference and making space for diverse bodies and minds, and the assumptions people make about who will be in a space or use a resource.

In the next episode, I talk with Dianne about a project she led to create a series of open, professional learning guides to support Indigenization in post-secondary institutions. Dianne describes the work and collaboration that went into bringing those guides to fruition. She also discusses the decision to publish these guides under an open license and how they thought through what license they wanted to apply. She also offers a critical perspective on openness in the context of Indigenous knowledges.

In this final episode, I talk with Marco about his work as an OER librarian and how he has supported faculty in creating low or no-cost materials that have specific social justice goals. He shares how his own positionality impacts the work he does in open education and offers a critical perspective on citational practices in open education scholarship.

I am so grateful for all of these guests for taking the time and speak to me about their areas of expertise and being so generous with their time and their willingness to share.

I’m really looking forward to sharing these episodes with all of you.

[Theme music]

Josie: You can learn more about this podcast at knowledgespectrums.opened.ca. On the website, you can find all episodes and transcripts, along with many other resources and information related to this project. Comments and Hypothes.is are enabled on the website, so if you have thoughts and ideas you want to share, that is a great place to post them.

You can connect with me on Twitter @josiea_g and you can tweet about the podcast using the hashtag #OKSPodcast.

I record this podcast on the traditional and unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, and the territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples.

The theme song is “Cool Upbeat Hip Hop Piano” by ItsMochaJones on freesound.org and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

This episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. You are welcome to share and remix this episode, as long as you give credit, provide a link back to the original source, and share any remixed work under the same license.

This has been Open Knowledge Spectrums. Thank you for listening.

[Music fades out]

—End of Episode—