Embedding Justice in the Work
What is Accessibility?
Our discussions and review of Open Educational Resources (OERs) adoption practices for this project have led to some important conversations about what accessibility means to faculty, instructors, teaching assistants, and staff in relation to open education. For the most part, conversations and definitions of accessibility centered on the belief that accessibility is about having access to information and education. It is premised on the belief that it is essential that everyone has access to OERs and other educational materials, regardless of their financial situation. At the same time some discussants suggested that accessibility is about designing an approachable course in relation to the subject matter and emphasized the need to meet students where they are in comprehension, experience, and reading levels. This would include an awareness of barriers from paywalls or passwords that could make an OER less accessible.
Rarely would accessibility in terms of being accessible to users with disabilities come into this conversations without prompting. This project has not only allowed for more conversations about the multifaceted and intersectional lens of accessibility, but has allowed for the review and editing of OERs that have been adopted to include more accessible elements and flag accessible additions for future versions of the resources adopted.
Identity and Positionality
Many aspects and types of justice appeared in conversations during the creation of this resource. One that appeared many times is the importance of considering identity and positionality when selecting and adopting an OER. Identity impacts how the learners relate to the material and how they can relate to other learners in the educational space and beyond.
Identity and positionality are foundational to addressing accessibility during the OER development and adoption process. To ensure sustainability, OERs engaging with experimental content require extensive human resources, ongoing interventionist practices, and funding, which we will expand on in another section. They may offer a platform to share perspectives on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), but they do not inherently accomplish the full range of challenges associated with accessibility if those identities are not taken into account. Through appropriate resources and proactive engagement, OERs can foster unity, inclusivity, equity, and social justice, contributing to meaningful impact and change.
Representational Justice
An aspect of identity that was emphasized in relation to the Mandela Global Human Rights Project, one of the OERs that was revisited for this project, is the importance of the use of visuals to guide users in a compassionate way, guiding them through critical thinking processes that could happen in equity and inclusion conversations. Using visuals, such as circle graphs, and infographics is also a way of acknowledging the different modalities that are possible for engaging, learning, and integrating knowledges from the OER. Recognizing multimodal engagement (textually, embodied, visually, auditorily) paves the way toward a more holistic understanding of learning. Learners will take away from OERs what is the most meaningful to them, and sometimes that meaning-making is done outside of a Pressbook environment or an H5P interactive element.
Sociopolitical Awareness
Access to information is limited in some sociopolitical environments worldwide. While OERs have the potential to transcend some of these limitations and share knowledge beyond them, they necessitate the contextualization of knowledge and ideas presented within an OER. The unpredictability of the sociopolitical landscape in which resources are utilized, read, and contemplated underscores the importance of language usage and awareness of one’s positionality. As discussed earlier, access to OERs brings a considerable responsibility for equity, inclusivity, and social responsibility.
Disability Justice
One of the more essential aspects of OER development involves comprehending disability justice, a paramount feature of EDI initiatives and an integral part of institutional accessibility and inclusion mandates. The ten disability justice principles outlined by Sins Invalid (2015) provide foundational aspects to consider when developing and adopting resources. Faculty and instructors should possess a nuanced understanding of their positionality and ongoing reflexivity. Without these qualities, OERs risk being subsumed and incorporated by ableist dominant frameworks, impacting the very issues they seek to address. Like many other academic initiatives, one of the solutions to a lack of, and reinforcement of, positionality emerges from collaboration with expert stakeholders and community members. This includes the awareness of intersectionality, understanding stratification, and being mindful of misinformation surrounding disability, disability rights, and accessibility resources.
Some faculty members have suggested guidelines for enhancing OER accessibility, such as integrating segments dedicated to accessibility within existing course content. In this particular instance, a faculty’s book centered around sports—an area ripe for highlighting the intersectionality of disability, parasport, the faculty was eager to work with parasport specialists to expand their resources and make them more equitable.
Viewing disciplines and subjects through the lens of accessibility requires deliberate intentionality. Regardless of the discipline—humanities, arts, science, or any other field—disability intersects with academic and societal discourse. Integrating accessibility considerations into OERs ensures that a broader range of perspectives are represented, thus promoting inclusivity and equity in education and beyond.
Citational Justice
Open educational resources allow for more citational justice, fostering inclusivity. For instance, in healthcare, traditional publishing often entails lengthy processes, resulting in information that may become outdated upon publication. OERs can facilitate real-time updates to content and allow for the sharing of several updated versions of the information. Furthermore, OERs present information in an interactive way, which increases engagement and offers multiple ways of interfacing with the content. Through OER publishing, citational justice can also help those newer to research, first-generation students, or those without a lot of institutional support to publish their research and be part of larger research conversations in their field. For example, citational justice and the practice around citing images is directly part of an OER introduction to visual culture adopted for first-year students.
Reference
Sins Invalid. (2015). 10 Principles of Disability Justice. SinsInvalid.org. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice
