Iowa OER

Webinar Summary: Alternative Open Ontologies – Open Education and “El Museo Indigenista”

In this month’s webinar, Marco Seiferle-Valencia, Open Education Librarian at the University of Idaho, gave a talk about the ways in which we situate “Open Education” as a movement. As the description of the talk stated,

“What do we lose by situating Open Education as a movement started in the 1990’s and 2000’s? The radical contributions of People of Color to the broader history of the fight for equitable, impactful, representational education!”

To watch a recording of this webinar, visit our YouTube channel or click on the video linked below:

Foregrounding the discussion

Seiferle-Valencia starts his talk with a discussion about the “traditional” positioning of Open Education as a movement, before quickly pivoting to a broader discussion about how we could frame Open Education work within the broader field of Education and with the context of educational praxis led by BIPOC scholars:

A slide reading: "By specifically and intentionally including WOC educational praxis into our open discourse, we help expand and situate Open as a movement in Education, which itself has always contained a socially justice oriented praxis led by BIPOC people."

This is the crux of the talk, an assertion that we need to move beyond our assumed history to explore the movements and contributions to opening education prior to 1990. However, the discussion doesn’t stop there. Marco goes on to discuss the ways in which Open Education as a movement has tried to situate itself as a community invested in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). DEI is certainly not a new concept in Open spaces, but intentional and grounded applications of DEI values are still rare even today. Seiferle-Valencia explains in his talk that DEI has been used as a band-aid in workplaces since it was first pushed in the 1960’s, stating:

“People have to take up an anti-racist praxis, and there’s a lot of obstacles [as] to why people don’t do that, or why they’re only engaged with [DEI] to a certain point.”

Still, there has been some excellent work has come from the growth of DEI initiatives in higher education, with experts like Regina Gong, Jasmine Roberts-Crew, and Dr. Kamille Gentles-Peart getting acknowledgments from Marco for their contributions to the field and for centering an anti-racist praxis in their Open Education leadership specifically.

Connections to Marco’s Work with Chicana por mi Raza

Seiferle-Valencia delved deeper into this discussion about how we define Open by sharing his experience managing Chicana por mi Raza, a digital archive of student-created and curated content about Chicanx and Latinx history. This site is certainly an educational resource, a part of broader, open community efforts, and a radical expression of learning. But is it “open” in the way we often define open today?

As Marco shares in his webinar, there are ways in which this project might not be considered “open” in the strictest sense of the term:

  • We don’t use CC licenses on our materials or holdings contributed and shared to the archive
  • We embrace traditional copyright protections
  • We don’t allow everyone/anyone access to all our holdings.
  • Researchers need to form a collaborative versus extractive relationship.

However, these choices were made intentionally to support the community that invested in Chicana por mi Raza, respecting their ownership of the material and knowledge they shared.

As Seiferle-Valencia states, the Rasquache Protocols for the Chicanx Digital Memory Praxis were set forth with the following in mind:

  • Grounded in Chicanx knowledge traditions/memory keeping
  • Collective/collaborative
  • Relationships over digital tools
  • Self-determination over visibility/assimilation
  • Pedagogy/capacity building over ownership of knowledge
  • Decentering the university as a site of power, building community knowledge hubs & distributed knowledge networks.

While he did not state it outright in his talk, I’d like to use this as an opportunity to ask the reader: “What is the purpose of Open Education?” If it is to follow a set of strict guidelines to meet a community definition of “Open,” then certainly, Chicana por mi Raza is something else; however, if the purpose of Open Education is to be a catalyst for radical sharing and participatory education, then even though the content within this collection might not be OER, the project itself is part of the wider Open Education landscape!

Luci Cruz and El Museo Indigenista

To round out his talk and give a more historical example of Open Education in action, Marco shared information about Dr. Luci Cruz and her work as a community historian supporting a small museum in Detroit, El Museo Indigenista. As he explains, the museum was full of educational materials (textbook excerpts, primary sources, original materials) intended to support the huge community of Latinx students and community members in the area who wanted to learn more about Mexican history.

Dr. Luci was an innovator and her work shares a lot in common with Marco’s own project, Chicana por mi Raza, in that it was not completely open in the way we see openness today. However, El Museo Indigenista was an incredibly meaningful effort to connect with the Detroit community that Luci served and to liberate knowledge in a way that serves that community specifically and intentionally. There is more to be said here, but I will refer to the recording and to Marco himself if you have questions.

Marco’s talk went on for another half an hour of discussion and Q&A, but he left us with these key takeaways and many resources of interest were shared as the webinar came to a close:

Key Takeaways

  • Open as a movement starts much earlier than the typically given history and includes the intellectual and labor contributions of BIPOC people right from the start.
  • This is just one example of an early open inventor – Dr. Luci Cruz, and her unique approach to filling in the gaps.
  • Broader open ontologies help to expand our Open movement and also reconnect us to our radical education roots.

Additional Resources

Readings

Presentations

Other Resources (Shared in the Chat)

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