Introduction to DEIA in OER for Social Justice
1.3 Finding Your Lens: Language, Theory, and Equity
Karna Younger and Theresa Huff
Power, Words, and Learning
When writing for DEIA, it’s important to unpack the relationship between power, white supremacy, representation, and language in OER. Recentering educational power involves not only the inclusion of the words and stories of historically marginalized peoples but also the voices of those who lived those experiences, as Sarah Lambert has argued.
As an author you want to empower students to think critically with terminology that is accurate and reflects the true histories of diverse identities and experiences. How to do so begins with your intentional choices from the wording of your learning outcomes through your inclusion of topics and perspectives.
How do I find the ‘Right’ Words?Â
As an author, writing for DEIA is about writing from a place of awareness: you’re taking a critical look at our society, engaging histories of oppression, and challenging students and educators to have real conversations about social inequalities. One way you can begin to understand the importance of word choice in your OER is to think about power and who holds it. In DEIA, we talk a lot about power dynamics when it comes to topics like systems of oppression, inequality, privilege, white supremacy, and structural racism. The terms that we use when talking about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion are rarely benign. But the common thread that weaves these topics together are words that have been used to justify these systems and enforce the marginalization of certain individuals and groups of people. In this context, you are building your OER.
Tackling TheoryÂ
You are a member of the OERFSJ cohort because of your experiences with centering DEIA in your teaching and approach to your discipline. From your mindset of an antiracist and intersectional professor your word choice will follow. Here, let’s discuss creating OER with two social theories (Seidman 2016) likely familiar to you. Social theories are frameworks used in social science and humanities disciplines to analyze, explain, and understand social structures, power dynamics, and cultural norms. There are many social theories to choose from, but we’ll focus on two that are the foreground of your equity lens: Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.
Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Intersectionality highlight how power structures in the United States privilege and disadvantage people. CRT was developed by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado. As scholars in the legal field, Bell, Crenshaw, and Delgado sought to underscore the role of race and racism embedded in the political, social, and economic structures of the United States. What makes CRT unique is its emphasis on both theory and practice:
“[CRT} cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others.” (George, 2021).
While CRT emphasizes race, your textbook will undoubtedly include topics related to gender, sexuality, religion, disability, and more. This is where intersectionality becomes important.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality was first coined in 1989 by Crenshaw. The legal scholar and civil rights advocate originally highlighted the importance of centering the experience of African American women at the intersection of both racism and sexism (hence the term: intersectionality), but scholars have applied Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality to a range of issues like gender, class, and disability.
While intersectionality is a crucial component of your equity lens, it’s important to note that it’s not a “grand theory of everything” (Crenshaw 2017). Intersectionality is your starting point for understanding why equity is important: we all hold multiple identities, and each of those identities can contribute to unique, varying experiences of inequality and oppression.
What's This Tool? - H5P Interactive Video
From theory to OER: recognitive and representational justice
Using such theories, Sarah Lambert called for OER that centralize social justice. As you will recall from your evaluation of OER, Lambert’s recognitive and representational justice elements provide us with a needed framework to improve and create OER. As a refresher, featuring the faces and cases of people of color in OER is an “act of recognitive justice.” Such showcasing, however, may perpetuate the higher education’s systematic history of being white-dominated and male-centric. As a result, Lambert pushes OER creators toward representational justice: the “self-determination of marginalised [sic] people and groups to speak for themselves, and not have their stories told by others.” Representational justice calls for the power dynamic to shift. No longer are historically marginalized groups the subject being studied, they are the authors controlling the narrative and bringing greater understanding to complex topics.
Use the interactive slide deck below to look at two problematic examples and consider strategies for improving course materials through recognitive and representational justice. You’ll read two passages, one from a McGraw Hill World Geography textbook (2016), and the other from Mexican American Heritage (Riddle, 2017).
What's This Tool? - H5P Course Presentation
Reflection: How can you integrate representational justice?
Resources
George, J. (2021). A lesson on critical race theory. American Bar Association.
World Geography. (2016). McGraw Hill.
News from Columbia Law School. (2017). Crenshaw on intersectionality, more than two decades later.
NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund. (2023). What is critical race theory?
Riddle, J., Angle, V. (2017). Mexican American Heritage. Momentum Instruction, LLC.
University of Washington Department of Epidemiology Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee. (2019). Glossary of equity, diversity, and inclusion terms.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8.Â
Crenshaw, K. (2016). The urgency of intersectionality [Video]. TEDWomen Conference.Â
Additional Reading (and Listening):
Brown McNair, T., Bensimon, E.M. & Malcolm-Piqueux, L. (2020). From equity talk to equity walk: Expanding practitioner knowledge for racial justice in higher education. Jossey-Bass.
Crenshaw, K. (2022). Intersectionality matters! [Podcast]. African American Policy Forum.
Crenshaw, K. (2017). On intersectionality: Essential writings. The New Press.
Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Pellar, G. & Thomas, K. (eds.) (1996). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed a movement. The New Press.
Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2012). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press.
DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
EducationWeek. (2021). Spotlight on critical race theory. Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.
Open for Antiracism Program. (n.d.) Community College Consortium for OER.
Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?: And other conversations about race. Basic Books.
Licenses and Attributions
“Finding Your Lens: Language, Theory, and Equity” by Theresa Huff and Karna Younger is adapted from “Finding Your Lens: Language, Theory, and Equity” by Heather Blicher and Valencia Scott for Open Oregon Educational Resources, used under CC BY 4.0. “Finding Your Lens: Language, Theory, and Equity” is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Power is unequally distributed globally and in U.S. society; some individuals or groups wield greater
power than others, thereby allowing them greater access to and control over resources. Wealth,
Whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms
through which power operates. (University of Washington, 2019)
The systemic and pervasive nature of social inequality woven throughout social institutions as well as
embedded within individual consciousness. Oppression fuses institutional and systemic discrimination,
personal bias, bigotry and social prejudice in a complex web of relationships and structures that
saturate most aspects of life in our society. Oppression also signifies a hierarchical relationship in which
dominant or privileged groups benefit, often in unconscious ways, from the disempowerment of
subordinated or targeted groups. (University of Washington, 2019)
White supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European
continent; for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege. (University of Washington, 2019)
A social construct that artificially divides people into distinct groups based on characteristics such as physical appearance (particularly skin color), cultural affiliation, cultural history, ethnic classification, and the social, economic and political needs of a society at a given period of time. There are no distinctive genetic characteristics that truly distinguish between groups of people. Created by
Europeans (Whites), race presumes human worth and social status for the purpose of establishing and maintaining privilege and power. Race is independent of ethnicity. (University of Washington, 2019)
A social construct that divides people into smaller social groups based on characteristics such as shared sense of group membership, cultural heritage, values, behavioral patterns, language, political and economic interests, history and ancestral geographical base. (University of Washington, 2019)
Gender is the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that society considers "appropriate" for men and women. It is separate from ‘sex’, which is the biological classification of
male or female based on physiological and biological features. A person's gender may not necessarily correspond to their birth-assigned sex or be limited to the gender binary (woman/man). (University of Washington, 2019)
A system of beliefs, usually spiritual in nature, and often in terms of a formal, organized institution. (University of Washington, 2019)
The process by which minority groups/cultures are excluded, ignored or relegated to the outer edge of a group/society/community. A tactic used to devalue those that vary from the norm of the mainstream, sometimes to the point of denigrating them as deviant and regressive. (University of Washington, 2019)
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to CRT, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the rates of the death of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies. (NAACP)
Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects (Crenshaw, 2017). This concept recognizes that individuals:
1) belong to more than one social category simultaneously and
2) may experience either privileges or disadvantages on that basis depending on circumstances and relationships (University of Washington, 2019).
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