One of the greatest areas of potential for open educational resources (OER) is the opportunity for improved representation and coverage of identities that often go erased or poorly addressed in educational materials. Information about, by, and for trans and gender diverse people is one such topic. With knowledge and intention, those involved in the creation, adaptation, and use of OER can find and incorporate materials that center trans and gender diverse people. Doing this is essential for supporting trans and gender diverse students and educating everyone about these identities.
What is this resource?
This resource is a guide on how to make OER more inclusive and representative of trans and gender diverse people. It is intended to be easily incorporated into a scholarly communications course, while also being valuable to faculty and others interested in learning about the topic and how to make changes to their own course materials.
Part 1: An annotated list of readings and other materials on the following topics:
- Introductory information about OER.
- Introductory information about trans and gender diverse people.
- Advancing social justice, trans inclusion, and queer inclusion through OER.
- Practical reference materials to help make OER more trans inclusive.
Part 2: A flexible instructor’s guide for a class session on trans and gender diverse inclusion in OER, to be adapted for inclusion in a scholarly communications course. The instructor’s guide incorporates the readings in the previous section and includes the following elements:
- Discussion questions and brief activities designed to help students learn how revising OER and making content more trans inclusive can work in practice.
- An assessment that instructors can use as a homework assignment or class project, in which students are directed to find an existing OER and write a description of how they would make it more trans inclusive using the tools covered in the readings and ideas from the discussion.
Who is this for?
We hope that this resource will be valuable to any number of people. Perhaps you regularly use OER but hadn’t thought about incorporating trans and gender diverse content; perhaps you’re very invested in gender inclusion but aren’t sure how OER can help. Perhaps you’re new to all of this, or already aware of both angles and looking for ways to combine them in your work. Use this resource in whatever way you like: read everything from start to finish, use one section but not others, or hop around and pick up bits and pieces.
