Dimension 3: Culturally Sustaining
Evaluating OER against the Connections criterion
Culturally Sustaining
OER challenge historic methods of legitimising academia and recognise and celebrate each learner’s culture, inviting learners to engage with a topic through the richness of their own lens.
The Equity Rubric for OER Evaluation gives a resource a high rating for Connections if it “critically centres around learners’ home and community experiences.”
The Rubric suggests looking for “content that allows students to include their daily home and community experiences as part of the learning process.”
Key Examples and Suggestions
GRSJ 224 Wiki
University of British Columbia students
This living OER is continuously developed by future cohorts of students who build on the work of their peers.
The course instructor, Janice Stewart, discusses the importance of the Wiki as an OER for their course:
“Official knowledge represents a very partial aggregate of culture because it is mapped in ways that typically exclude members of marginalized groups.
Participatory technologies, such as the GRSJ 224 WIKI, enable active relationships to public knowledge and new forms of educational innovation and participatory citizenship.”
Access: GRSJ 224 Wiki
Learning Resource: Wikis for Teaching
Arts ISIT, University of British Columbia
This online resource provides guidance for why and how to use Wikis as OER. It includes real life case studies to explore.
Access: Wikis for Teaching
Content Suggestion: TikTok videos reflecting learners’ communities
A college course in California uses TikTok videos to show examples of how the “same” language can be quite different in different cultures (Orozco, CAL OER 2022).
For example, one TikTok video showed students who spoke Spanish at home receiving feedback that, on a Spanish language test at school, they spoke words such as “pen” incorrectly because they use a different word for “pen” in their culture or dialect.
When the education system and materials are not tailored to the relevant community context, they implicitly teach learners they speak the “wrong” type of Spanish, that their culture is “wrong”.
Incorporating videos that celebrate the diverse range of vocabulary and cultures within a language empowers learners to leverage their community experiences and feel a sense of pride and connection.
Content Suggestion: Glossary task
Empower students to create meaning of key concepts by developing their own glossary using personal anecdotes which contextualise the idea in a way that makes sense for them.
This task can be set individually or collaboratively with students working on a class glossary where multiple definitions and non-text-based entries (e.g. memes, audio, video) are enabled for each concept. This can be incorporated into a larger OER through the use of H5P.
Access: Documentation Tool
Create a template with key terms for the learner to define.
Download this page (pdf)
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