Implementing Open Education and Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices to Advance Equity

Open education and culturally responsive teaching can work together to advance equity in higher education courses. The benefits begin with the money saved using open educational textbooks, to the flexibility of open pedagogy and open educational resources to respond to the interests and needs of a diverse range of students, spanning to their ability to bring students’ identities and culturally specific knowledge and lived experiences into all aspects of the curriculum. Integrating open and culturally responsive teaching lends itself to practices that uplift and validate students' capacities and identities such as the co-creation of knowledge, authentic assessment practices, and centering students’ cultures in course design, materials, and activities. In this presentation, Achieving the Dream team members provide course-level exemplars of faculty and students engaging in open and culturally responsive teaching and learning and invite participants to consider where in their courses they can work on utilizing similar approaches. We engage in these equity-centered educational exercises to intentionally center students who deserve equity yet have not historically had access to it in higher education and to impact the educational experiences and outcomes for BILPOC students who have been repetitively and structurally marginalized in higher ed spaces.