Adapting for Anti-Racism: Collaboratively Diversifying Faculty Open Professional Development

Abstract

Higher education institutions have become increasingly interested in exploring the innovative learning opportunities afforded by open educational resources and practices (OER). These same institutions have begun to more seriously consider ways to eradicate racism. However, few institutions have considered the ways that OER may prove useful in dismantling anti-racism and how to prepare instructional faculty to do so. Given their expertise and research skills, librarians may be uniquely positioned to take on this role. In this paper, we explore one such online asynchronous effort–adaptation and implementation of the Open for Anti-Racism faculty workshop in a Learning Management System–and offer insights for librarians and instructional faculty. These findings include: the importance of 1) adapting for local institutional context, 2) providing multimodal peer engagement opportunities, and 3) having facilitators occupying different professional roles and social locations.