Open Educational Resources (OERs) for Professional Development

Abstract

With the recent introduction of multidisciplinary education by the National Education Policy (Ministry of Education, Government of India, 2020), and the corresponding changes envisaged in teacher education, the question that now remains is how to train in-service teachers to adopt multidisciplinary teaching practices. This chapter proposes a model for professional development of ESL teachers to help them adopt multidisciplinary pedagogies. By incorporating features like personalization, contextualization, collaboration, continuity, ease, etc., the model exemplifies the various proven-effective features of professional development recommended by previous researchers. Updating teacher development to match twenty-first century student requirements, the chapter also discusses development of teacher agency through creation and sharing of open educational resources (OERs). The chapter discusses how collaborating with teachers within one’s teaching contexts to create multidisciplinary tasks and publishing these tasks as OERs can ensure not just teachers’ cognitive and pedagogic development utilizing collective wisdom, building collaborative ownership practices, and developing a culture of trust, but also dissemination and sustainability of OERs. It gives a practical example of a collaboration between an English teacher, a Civics teacher, and a History teacher. Together, they create an OER using appropriate technological tools which are simple and easy to use, though the English teacher plays a major role.KeywordsMultidisciplinary curriculumTeacher educationTechnology-mediated CPDProfessional development of ESL teachersTeacher agencyOpen educational resources