Open Education Global is pleased to announce that the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER), jointly with College of the Canyons, has received an additional two-year grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, to expand and extend the Open for Anti-Racism (OFAR) program supporting faculty in California Community Colleges.
The OFAR program, first piloted in spring 2021, sought to demonstrate how faculty in the California Community College system could use open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy to make their instructional materials and their teaching practices anti-racist. Participating faculty learned about anti-racism, open educational resources, and open pedagogy in a course entitled Open for Anti-Racism.
Ninety percent of participants indicated that their teaching practice improved. Faculty employed three key strategies: incorporating student voices to include non-mainstream perspectives and points of view; co-create materials with students for an anti-racism module; integrate inclusive media (images, data, videos, podcasts, etc.) to illustrate and explicitly discuss racism, oppression, privilege, and healing.
One student commented:
“I enjoy the content of the class and I can relate it to my own life. We learned a bit about other people’s perspectives and it is helpful information for everyday life.”
Due to these strategies, over eighty percent of students reported feeling more active or engaged in the OFAR class than in their other classes. Factors identified included faculty’s effort to engage students in the learning process, the specific content covered, or direct and specific interactions with other students as a required part of class.
The second round of funding extends the program over two semesters, enabling more faculty members to engage with, plan and strategize in more depth, thereby reaching more students. Faculty will be invited to apply as college teams in order to maximize alignment of their antiracist class implementations with the strategic goals of their institutions.
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) promotes the awareness and adoption of open educational policies, practices, and resources. We believe that these practices will expand student access to education while supporting academic freedom and faculty choice of openly licensed curriculum materials. Our membership includes hundreds of colleges across North America. CCCOER is part of Open Education Global.