It’s Not (Just) About the Cost: Academic Libraries and Intentionally Engaged OER for Social Justice

Abstract:How can librarians seize the radical affordances of OER to complicate standard narratives with the stories of those historically and systemically marginalized? Using work created through the University of Idaho’s Think Open Fellows 2019–20 Cohort as a starting point, the author explores how these projects created OER content that demonstrates Lambert’s three principles of OER and social justice. The author discusses the unique potentials of the academic library to support intentionally engaged OER as well as the responsibility of librarians to center marginalized perspectives in their work with faculty as cocreators and identifiers of OER. A discussion of some of the transformative aspects of this work follows, including the potential impacts on librarians with marginalized identities in creating intentionally engaged OER, as briefly examined through bell hooks’s notion of engaged pedagogy. The article concludes with a call to action, inspired by hooks and Austin, to specifically and intentionally diversify the perspectives represented in the OER we identify and create as librarians.