Author Profiles and Positionality Statements

As an OER author, you want to create a comfortable and inclusive learning environment for your students and any faculty who may teach with your OER.  Given you are offering to navigate the many peaks and valleys of learning for your readers, it is reasonable that they would want to know a bit about you. Just as you would the first day of class, you will tell the tale that brought you to this trail and make your companions feel at home. You will not just detail your academic achievements but contextualize your open education journey. Who you are as an author, scholar, and person, and how such roles are interrelated in your OER authorship will be encapsulated in your positionality statement. Let’s explore what that entails.

What is a Positionality Statement?

Before you start a standard professional introduction, let’s define positionality statements. Most of us have written an author profile. As a narrative form of our curriculum vitae, author profiles include our professional title or rank, degrees and awarding institutions, and some selected publications. If we have more room, we add current projects, theses or dissertations supervised, or significant professional service.

Positionality statements, on the other hand, extend beyond scholarly qualifications and offer greater context. You may reflect on how your worldview, social identities, and personal motivations shape your professional work, such as creating an OER. Social identities may include but are not limited to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, educational background, first language, and geographic location, as you may recall from the Nurturing a DEIA Mindset for Your OER. Instead of a tea-spilling tell-all or an act of self-flagellation, a positionality statement is a thoughtful and vulnerable understanding of how your lived experiences influence your pedagogical work. Certainly, acknowledging biases and limitations is helpful for obtaining an objective approach to your work, but there are benefits to acknowledging the advantages of your perspective as well.^[1] Providing such background can aid in transparency with learners.

How Does it Benefit Students? 

Your positionality statement offers greater context for your pedagogical approach and can establish your OER as an inclusive learning space. By revealing the interplay between your OER creation and its topical treatments as well as your professional development and lived experiences, you can reveal biases in your field that “privilege some sources of authority over others” and help students understand how authors’ identities may shape information.^[2] Your statement, for instance, may explain the limits and strengths of leading authorities in your field, how you complement or contradict these conventions, which would allow students to decenter normative academic authorities.^[3] You are no longer a know-it-all sage on the stage, but a guide for your students’ academic journey. Students from historically marginalized backgrounds can feel empowered to see their own identities and lived experiences as a benefit to their scholarship.^[4]

Being vulnerable and transparent about your own personal and professional identities can empower your students to value their own and their colleagues’ positionalities. David Takacs, a law professor in California whose students regularly practice reflection on the relationship between authors’ identities and their own identities to evaluate information, finds acknowledging positionalities 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.”^[5] 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.^[6]

What are Some Examples?

Your positionality statement should be unique to you and your approach to open education. There isn’t really a standard for length, criteria, or substance. You simply must be authentic to yourself and your project.

Your Positionality Statement

Select the arrow below to view a tutorial to draft your positionality statement. Within the tutorial, the arrows at the bottom of the activity will guide you through a series of questions to help articulate elements of your narrative. At the end of the tutorial, you will be able to export and save your draft to revise and publish in your OER front matter.

Wrap up

Now that you have a sense of what a positionality statement entails and even a draft of your own, you will want to place your statement in your OER. Your co-authors and you may elect to highlight your positionality statements on their own page in the front matter of your OER or embed them within the introduction of your OER. Again, there is no right or wrong placement. The placement of your positionality statements should best support your reader in understanding your authentic and unique approach to creating an OER.

Image Descriptions

Image 1. Screenshot of an “About the Author” page from Why Do I Have to Take This Course? [Revised Edition]. The page includes a photograph of author Kisha G. Tracy wearing glasses and a black graduation cap, followed by two paragraphs about her upbringing, education, and academic influences. Transcript:

Why do I have to take this course? [REVISED EDITION]; ABOUT THE AUTHOR; Kisha G. Tracy

I grew up in a small town in rural southern Illinois. My parents were both teachers, one in elementary school and one in secondary school sciences. From an early age, I began hearing and thinking about education, from theory to practice. Although my own interests leaned towards literature, history, and other humanities, I was equally exposed to STEM and have found the skills and ways of thinking in these areas, especially when combined with those in the humanities, incredibly useful as well as perspective-changing.

From kindergarten until I graduated from high school, there were no people of color in my school system or even in the entire county. The year I went away to start college, a Christian group of color moved in and started a business on the town square—in front of which a cross was burned almost immediately. When I entered undergrad, my first professor in my chosen field—Medieval Studies—was a scholar of color, Dr. Annette Parks in the History department at the University of Evansville. I did not realize it then, of course, but, as a result of her involvement in my early academic pursuits, my entire view of Medieval Studies was distinct from many who entered the field. In her courses, we often focused on the marginalized, on women, on peasants, on prisoners of war—on many whose voices are not always at the forefront in discussions about the period. Given the experiences of my younger self, I am grateful for her impact on me at the beginning of my academic career. [Return to Image 1]

Image 2. Screenshot of the introduction page from Statistics Through an Equity Lens [Revised Edition]. The page explains the book’s equity-focused approach to statistics, including how data can expose or reinforce social inequities. It also invites readers to examine their own perspectives, identities, and positions of power. The final paragraph begins a personal reflection by the author but is cut off at the bottom of the image. Transcript:

Statistics through an equity lens [REVISED EDITION]; INTRODUCTION

This Open Educational Resource (OER) carries a significant responsibility by presenting statistics through an equity lens. The metaphor of a lens is used intentionally—as the glasses one wears can have a profound effect on what one sees. “Your eyes come into contact with the world—but what do they really see? Your perception is affected by the outer environment and by the ecology of your inner world.”[1]

As such, the book encourages further inspection of the ways in which data is collected, interpreted, and analyzed on a variety of social justice issues, such as health disparities, hunger, and food insecurity, homelessness, behavioral health (mental health and substance use), and incarceration of males of color. The book endeavors to heighten awareness of how data can close disparities for marginalized or underserved communities. It also attempts to reveal how the misuse of data can reinforce inequities, for example, by stigmatizing people and labeling neighborhoods as high poverty, violent, and having poor educational opportunities. Whether an intended or unintended consequence, irresponsible data use can contribute to racist impressions of people and communities.

Whether you are a student taking this Introductory Statistics course, a seasoned statistician, or a policymaker working for a state or federal government, it is our dharma to use and manage data responsibly and ethically.[2] Adopting an “equity talk or walk” means that you critically examine data through a lens that questions how and why inequalities exist for those who have been historically and continuously marginalized in society, and perhaps how to help envision and construct a more equitable future.

This OER book is intended to get you started (or continue) on your “equity-mindfulness” journey. As you go through this journey, I encourage you to think critically about diversity-related issues, power, and oppression and gain an understanding of people from racial/ethnic groups different from your own. Hopefully, you will reflect on your own position of power in society.

I had a Black Father and a Filipino Mother and grew up culturally Black in the low-income neighborhoods of North Philadelphia. I attended Catholic private schools (K-12) and was a National Merit Commended student in the 12th grade. My entire post-secondary education has been fully funded through merit scholarships and fellowships…[Return to Image 2]