What is OER and How Could it Help?

Creative Commons defines open educational resources as “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, adaptation and redistribution by others.''¹ Simply put, they are resources that are free to access, download, adapt, and share. Openly licensed materials are often described as having “5R permissions,” meaning anyone is free to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them.² Their adaptability and shareability, in particular, distinguishes them from resources that are simply free.

Though OER is perhaps best known in the context of higher education, where textbooks are infamous for their rising costs, the movement around OER in PreK–12 education is growing rapidly. Around the country, states and districts have committed to #GoOpen, an effort supported by the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate schools transitioning from offering courses that use traditional copyright-bound and typically printed textbooks to offering one or more courses in which instructional materials are openly licensed, and typically available digitally.³ At the same time, many individual districts and schools are making the transition themselves, participating in networks and hosting summits to support other systems in learning about open resources. Unlike in higher education, the push toward PreK–12 OER has already been focused on teacher-facing resources and curricular materials, so creating inclusive materials would not present a substantially different approach to OER.

To understand what it can look like to harness OER for teacher-facing materials, take Garnet Valley School District (GVSD), in Pennsylvania, as an example. GVSD is a #GoOpen district that has created a four-stage, student-centered process for designing courses and has published it on the district’s website.⁴ As a hub for professional learning in the district, the site includes resources for teachers around curriculum design and instructional design, among other topics. Because the materials available through the hub are openly licensed, any educator in—or outside of—the district can access them for free, tailor them to meet their own needs, and share them. One of the content areas available is an introduction to OER for educators who may be unfamiliar with it. This model is in contrast to traditional, proprietary professional learning materials, which can be costly, repetitive, and restricted to the individual districts or schools that have purchased them.

As the movement for using OER has grown, so too has the number of available resources, repositories, and toolkits. The International Society for Technology in Education has a course for educators on getting started with OER, created by practitioners and OER experts. The growing number of available resources is making it easier than ever for educators to understand the benefits of OER. However, very few PreK–12 educators are aware of OER in the first place, as open licensing remains a relatively new alternative to proprietary materials and initially can be hard for educators to conceptualize. What is more, even with all these available resources, none are specifically queer-inclusive, teacher-facing materials.⁵ The context for the problem is a dichotomy of sorts: there exist free and paid queer-inclusive educator resources that are not openly licensed, and openly licensed educator resources that are not queer-inclusive, but it appears that no resources exist to meet both needs.

To bridge this gap and position OER as a viable tool for queer inclusion, educators will need to gain exposure to and a deeper understanding of the opportunities it presents. The biggest selling points of OER are often logistical: cost, time, and customization. These benefits are important and alone make OER worth considering. But these benefits go beyond simply saving schools time and money; they present unique opportunities for individualized, inclusive, and dynamic teacher professional learning that often go unnoticed. Below are some of the ways OER could be useful in building queer equity.

Cost

Because OER are typically digital, though they are sometimes printed for classroom use as well, one of the biggest misconceptions about PreK–12 OER is that the resources are completely free. It is understandable that those unfamiliar with OER might assume that it zeros out the costs involved with printing and delivering boxes of textbooks and teacher workbooks. However, while already-existing open resources are indeed free for educators to access and use, and they do eliminate printing and shipping costs, transitioning a school or district to OER is a reinvestment of time and resources, not a total cost elimination. Teacher training around the discovery and use of these materials is one part of this reinvestment.

When schools create resources under an open license, educators everywhere can access and use them. Given the preponderance of PreK–12 educators who want to better engage queer and trans students but do not know how, this is a key benefit. Openly licensing queer-inclusive professional learning resources would allow educators in every school—not just those in schools that can afford to purchase new materials—the chance to better serve queer and trans students.

The long-term cost savings of OER could also be a powerful lever in the argument for queer-inclusive classrooms. Even more than personal bias or myths about LGBTQ identities, the cost of new materials is most commonly cited in arguments against inclusive materials. And, even when districts modernize textbooks, they quickly become outdated again as our understanding of queer identities and the language we have to describe them change. Using OER, schools could easily customize and update resources to ensure relevance.

Adaptability

The adaptability of OER refers to the flexibility they offer teachers and school leaders to customize and update materials. While it is useful for teachers to have current and individualized content in all areas of professional learning, it is especially important in this context, because our understanding of queer identities and the language we have to describe them is constantly evolving. The words that members of the LGBTQ community used to describe themselves 50 years ago are not the same ones they use today; some have been dropped, some have become popular, and others have been reclaimed. Using the preferred language to describe a group of people is necessary for recognizing and respecting historically-marginalized people, and understanding the diversity and evolution of a community. Preparing educators to do this shows respect and understanding to all students.

Where proprietary materials quickly become outdated, OER allows for anyone to update or correct content within them and then republish under a similar license, giving attribution to the original author. By creating or using materials under an open license, not only would schools be free from the burden of using outdated content, but they would also be able to tailor the material to their needs and context. One of the most salient benefits of OER for culturally responsive teaching is the ability to customize the content to a particular geographical region, school make-up, or historical context. The same could be true for teacher professional learning. If, for example, teachers at a particular school using OER wanted extra resources for engaging trans students of color, school leaders could simply add them to preexisting materials, or edit them to include more background on trans identities. With an open license, these resources could easily be adapted to include important moments in trans history, such as Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, or gender-neutral pronouns across languages, such as the Spanish ellx. Many of the free resources currently available cover the same touch points of the LGBTQ community broadly, while others narrow down to a specific set of lessons or information.

Not a wholesale solution for all the challenges that arise from proprietary teacher training, OER also presents some challenges when it comes to adaptation. If editing resources is a possibility, the question arises, whose role is it to customize these resources? And how can teachers be sure that those customizing them have the necessary knowledge, information, and good intentions to do so? These questions and others should remain at the forefront of these efforts.

With quality content, educators could use OER to both seek out general information where needed, and build relevant and individualized materials based on their specific learning needs, classroom, or level of comfort with the topic—an opportunity especially important for those looking to include voices from multiple marginalized identities. These benefits could and should extend to updating professional learning materials to include other groups and populations as well, allowing educators to highlight the intersections between various identities and cultural backgrounds.

Shareability

Finally, the ability to share openly licensed materials is a benefit of OER in all contexts, but especially when it comes to queer inclusion. Anyone can openly license content using a Creative Commons license. The organization even has a tool for understanding which CC license is right for you.⁶ Different licenses denote different permissions, whether, for example, something can be used commercially or whether derivatives of the original content can be re-published.

When it comes to queer-inclusive materials and teacher professional learning, there are more resources available than educators might think. Organizations such as GLSEN, Teaching Tolerance, and Gender Spectrum all have materials on engaging and supporting queer and trans students that are free but not open. This means that educators anywhere can access and use them for their own purposes, but cannot legally adapt or share them around without consent from their creators. With this limitation, educators can only share links to the resources on the website where they originally appear, but cannot share the content on teacher websites, networks, or portals. Copyright laws also prevent educators from sharing versions of the original content, should they add to it, with others who might be looking for that same content. These restrictions mean that the few educators with the time, support, will, and resources to engage in queer-inclusive professional learning are limited in their ability to share this knowledge with others.

Though OER may be a useful tool for addressing these challenges, it is not a panacea. Skeptics of OER have cited quality assurance as a challenge in creating materials, and it remains the case for queer-inclusive materials. How can we be sure material that educators or school leaders develop is accurate, timely, and framed with as little bias as possible? There is also a question of whose voice is heard when the queer community relies on members of the education system or the general public, who may not fully grasp the needs of queer individuals, to create content. Given the disparities in broadband access and availability, would only those with the privilege of technology and time to produce content have a voice? How could we ensure that OER remains a tool not only for the most privileged and resourced educators, but for all? Historically, only the least marginalized LGBTQ people—those with race, socioeconomic, and cisgender privilege—have had a voice in framing and representing the community. While OER holds exciting possibility, education leaders should remain mindful of barriers to access so it does not become a tool for sustaining inequities.