As community college faculty, we recognize the multiple barriers that impact our students, and the cost of textbooks is one of those barriers. For this reason, we elected to work on an open educational resource for our students. This is no small undertaking- and while we did not write this text from scratch, we spent hundreds of hours across a two-year period to create an open and applicable textbook which we hope better meets the needs of our students. Creating an OER text is a fluid process, involving many months of writing and re-writing, and critical collaboration amongst colleagues.
We are grateful to the authors Molly Zhou and David Brown for their original work on the text Educational Learning Theories: 2nd Edition. We recognize what a huge project this was for them. Thanks to their having created the original work as an OER text, we had the great privilege to build on their work and offer a new text more suitable for our students. Other future authors may additionally recreate a text for their students as this is the iterative process of creating OER texts and for this open creative academic process, we are immensely grateful.
We also wish to thank Amy Hofer, Jen Klaudinyi, and all the library staff across the state who support and promote Open Educational Resources through workshops and grants. This is a critical equity initiative which increases access for all, and notably historically-underserved communities across the state. It also allows everyday teachers and faculty to engage in textbook creation, and this is no small feat. We would like to thank Ceci De Valdenebro for piloting this text with her class at Portland Community College, and to Lauren Hall for reviewing the draft.
We put a great deal of effort into editing out theoretical details and data that did not relate to the K-12 classroom. We created everyday classroom scenarios, incorporated videos and images, added critical questions and perspectives on equity, as well as additional resources to make the text more readable and inviting. We created a glossary of terms as our students are also learning the academic language that accompanies these concepts. As community college faculty, we kept our students front and center in our minds as we recreated this text.
The call to update curriculum has perhaps never been so important as we start to reckon with systems that have created great inequities in the US, and indeed the larger global community. Included in these systems are the various canons of academia. Who controls the canon is the very definition of power and influence. Central to these theoretical frameworks in education has been the white male perspective, embedded in the ubiquitous racist patriarchal world in which these theories were established. Re-centering these voices would require an entirely new text- and this was simply beyond our scope for this project. However, we have added a chapter on Critical Pedagogy, including Critical Race Theory, as one step to update and include important voices to motivate and engage our students. We encourage other faculty to continue the work of re-centering the canon of educational theory. This will take a village of committed everyday faculty.
“Racism is an epistemology (the way we gather knowledge) that has been inculcated through a curriculum and societal system”
~Pranav Patel~
