8.7 Author Profiles and Positionality Statements

Including a positionality statement with your OER can set an important equity tone for your readers, students and faculty seeking to adapt your OER. First, it can make your OER creation process more transparent to readers, showing that your OER didn’t just fall from the ceiling. You can reveal the construction and context of your scholarly identity, cluing your reader into what gaps you hope to fill through the strengths of your identify and what remains to be addressed because of your limitations. Doing so may clue adapting faculty into how they can remix and contribute to your work or utilize it in their courses.

Acknowledging such strengths and weaknesses can especially key for creating inclusive learning spaces for students. While experts like faculty know that biases “privilege some sources of authority over others,” students may struggle to understand how an author’s identity may shape information, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) summarizes. In other words, sharing your positionality shows the limits and strengths of your authority, decenters your position as the authoritative norm, and explains your pedagogical approach to OER. For instance, your positionality may explain why and how how you have shifted from the “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side” to create a more inclusive learning experience with and for all students but especially students from historically marginalized backgrounds.^[3] It may be your OER is the vehicle by which you empower students to create and share knowledge that builds on their lived experiences.

In other words, your positionality statement can serve as the foundation for your inclusive teaching practices. Such a transparent reflexivity can empower your students to value their own and their colleagues’ positionalities. David Takacs, a law professor in California, has made it a regular practice for his students to reflect on the relationship between author’s identities and their own identities to evaluate information, finding it positively creates an atmosphere where different perspectives are valued and are a part of greater understanding and learning. “Since positionality is the multiple, unique experiences that situate each of us, no one student’s perspective is privileged,” Takacs explains. “Rather, all are privileged, and therefore all are empowered to speak: the students from minority as well as majority cultures can help teach each other in an atmosphere of mutual respect.”^[4] Through this collaborative and mutually respectful understanding, young scholars may begin to understand the value and need for their own positionality to fill any scholarly gaps.^[5]