Reimagining OERs in Humanities Courses: Best Practices for Literature, Mythology, Art History & More
This session will begin with several brief presentations of creative ways college faculty have used OERs in humanities courses. They will also share innovative ways of supplementing OERs with course materials that fall outside the public domain and creative commons licensing but still do not pass any costs on to students. The session will be open for attendees to ask questions and share their challenges, solutions, and innovations for reimagining how we do OER in the humanities.
Learning Outcomes:
Attendees will learn innovative ways to implement OERs in humanities courses (literature, mythology, art history, etc.) and to supplement OER materials using library, public domain, and online resources.
Open Art Histories: Reimagining How We Teach Visual and Material Cultures
Presenters: Alena Buis, Johanna Amos, Sarah E. K. Smith, Jen Kennedy, Elizabeth Cavaliere, Devon Smither
Open Art Histories (OAH) is a platform for art, art history, visual art, architecture, communication, and museum studies teachers and instructors in Canada. Our goal is to build a generative and supportive network for addressing the pressing pedagogical challenges confronting these fields, including globalizing art history, teaching English-as-an-additional-language students, decolonizing the discipline and classroom, and advancing accessibility and inclusion. This collaborative workshop explores how we might adapt our pedagogical practices to best represent a field in flux, one that is no longer bound by a single historical narrative or set of objects? What approaches or tools might we develop or adopt to make our increasingly dynamic field accessible to the increasingly diverse students in our classrooms? How can open access, online resources, and new technologies, which have dramatically transformed the way both text and object are encountered, shape course content and delivery, while providing dynamic, tangible, and sustainable outcomes for students? Participants will consider the challenges in teaching visual and material culture both within the discipline of art history and beyond as a way to order and reimagine, reinvigorate, reinvent, and reshape the teaching of the discipline for our times.
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this session, participants will be able to: identify the challenges in teaching visual and material cultures in the 21st century; make connections between the challenges and pedagogical tools (resources, programs, apps) currently available;
and, envision ethical and sustainable open educational practices in their own teaching and curriculum.
Teaching Lysistrata in an Age of Protest
CC BY: Jessalynn Bird
Reclaiming the Classics for a Diverse and Global World was designed to make works of ancient civilizations accessible in translation at a minimal cost to students. At present, by partnering with our library and locating OER resources, the cost to the student is nil. The usage of OER resources also allows for flexibility and portability in time of COVID–they can be accessed anywhere there is wifi, and also downloaded and printed. Affordability is of prime concern to our students, as is the tendency for classical works to be hijacked by alt-right groups in order to reinforce their sense of cultural ‘superiority’. If, as Ta-Nehesi Coates stressed, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” works of antiquity should be accessible and reinterpretable to speak to the experiences of diverse student bodies. For that reason, this course pairs Euripides’ Trojan Women with the performance of that play by Syrian refugees. It pairs Euripides’ Medea with authors of color’s reinterpretation of Medea, as published in Cambria Press’ Black Medea (and Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea). Other classical works are used to investigate themes of interest both to the ancient world and our own, including concepts of gender and sexuality, free and unfree status, social mobility or restriction, migration and citizenship, protest, transformation, economic and social disparity, and imperialist pretensions. Another focus of the course is the diversity of art in the ancient world, with special focus on the representations of individuals from Africa, Egypt, and Asia. Lysistrata will be used as an example of the kind of relevancy and urgency which can be created in the classroom with OER texts.
Learning Outcomes: This session examines how to adapt existing OER resources to make them more accessible to diverse student learners. In this instance, the text is Lysistrata and the adaptation consisted of the addition of notes and an introduction and the LibreText platform. Accessibility was increased through demonstrating how ancient texts are reinterpreted to become relevant to modern concerns, in this case, women’s marches, protests,sex-strikes, and #BLM, through pairing the play with Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.
