In the first stage of OERFSJ, your team evaluated existing OER using David Wiley’s 5R activities for openness (retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute). Wiley’s 5Rs prompted you to consider how freely you and your students could access, use, and adapt OER for your course. The gap analysis and evaluation utilized Sarah Lambert’s three principles of social justice for OER (redistributive, recognitive, and representational) to assess OER as equitable educational tools. Your assessment and reflection helped your team develop a sense of how your discipline would benefit from an OER that centers social justice and diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism (DEIA) content. Now we want to develop strategies for implementing this objective.

When creating and remixing OER, it is important for us to be intentional about the language we use, challenging our own biases and assumptions as authors, and centralizing historically marginalized voices. Among disciplinary implications, this means that we don’t shy away from histories of inequality and injustice and that we actively work to cite the work of people of color. To achieve this, we need to engage with an equity lens to guide our OER creation.

So what is an equity lens?

Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist, activist, and researcher, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Leading with an equity lens in curriculum design means shining a light on underrepresented perspectives, centering them, and diving deeper into the histories of systemic oppression that lead to social injustices and disparities we live with today.

Wells-Barnett I. B. Bay M. & Gates H. L. (2014). The light of truth: writings of an anti-lynching crusader. Penguin Books.