Open Education Global 2022

In this presentation, I propose a sustainable model for OER-Enabled Pedagogy (OEP) that brings together Higher Education and Secondary institutions through strategic engagement of the 5Rs (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute) of OEP. This model was built through The Pathways Project – an Open Educational Resource (OER) that is a repository of more than 700 high-quality, editable digital materials. These materials are ancillary activities that support standards-based pedagogy centered on critical human inquiry for ten world languages and cultures. Activities are task based and foster interpersonal speaking and intercultural competence which are two critical competencies often lacking from textbooks and areas where teachers need a lot of support.

First, I will provide a brief overview of the Pathways Project with particular focus on outreach and engagement efforts with K-12 institutions. Second, I will discuss how we work with both pre and in-service teachers to provide a sustainable and scalable mentorship program whereby K-12 world language teachers engage in OEP and norm to best practices in language teaching as a result in the process. Finally, I will reflect on best practices and opportunities for growth as we continue our next phase in the project.

Most research on the impact of OER and OEP has focused on higher education and has not
evaluated teacher practices using OERs. Furthermore, it centers on the impact of OER textbooks rather than examining the effectiveness of ancillary materials more highly regarded by K-12 teachers for their customizability. Communities that engage in OEP have been shown to have success in long term sustainability of using OER and they help spur further collaboration in OEP and trust with others in the OEP community. Yet, opportunities for humanities K-12 teachers to engage in OEP is rare and OER may be the most practical means to enhance K-12 teaching and learning in the humanities.

The Pathways Project has proven an effective model to bridge higher education and K-12 institutions to engage in OEP. Since its inception in 2018, the Pathways Project has brought together a community of researchers, teachers, students, and staff for the K-16 levels. The Pathways Project was created at a university in the mountain west region of the United States and four years later, it’s user base overwhelmingly stems from K-12 institutions. This is in large part due to grass roots efforts in community outreach that have been successful in addressing critical needs for K-12 teachers. The next phase in the project is to engage K-12 teachers in moving beyond the Retain and Reuse cycles to Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. In January 2022, the Pathways Project received a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities grant to carry out a 2-year research evaluation project that will support these efforts. This project is innovative because we will evaluate K-12 urban and rural pedagogy impacted over time and explicitly train teachers to remix and redistribute Pathways and other digital humanities materials aligned to world languages and cultures.