Equity Redesign Diary: Making a Bigger Bookshelf

Yesterday I wrote up something about the Peralta Online Equity Rubric, both because it is something useful for my JHU book project (esp. the rubric's research bibliography which I need to explore) and also because it is very relevant to ongoing events at my school; there was even a statement from our Faculty Senate in support of the student sit-in today which I thought was really powerful! With students leading the way, and faculty lending their support, we might really make some powerful changes to teaching and learning at OU. And it's been a long time coming...

The university has already committed to some kind of equity training for faculty. I hope that it is not just some perfunctory click-here-click-there here's-your-certificate like our fire safety training. Maybe we will be hearing soon about some of the ideas people have in mind! My hope is that there will be a strong focus on course redesign so that there will be actual changes we see in OU classrooms as a result of his initiative.

For example, something I would love to see is a big group blogging project (we could have a massive group blog at OUCreate!), where faculty would commit to blogging at least once a semester, and more often hopefully, about their thoughts on redesigning their courses for equity.

Doing something big...

Doing something small...

Just doing something and then sharing the process and what they are learning via a blog post.

I doubt anything like that will happen, but hey, a girl can dream, right? And I am guessing people could get so many ideas about designing-for-equity just from browsing through the Peralta Online Equity Rubric and all kinds of great resources that we could gather and share together.

So, in the spirit of such a project, I'm going to use Equity Redesign as a label here at the blog, and I'll make this my first post, with a commitment to come back and revisit this topic at least once a month as this semester continues to unfold.

And for the topic of this first post, I'll write up a change I made in my daily course announcements, as inspired by the students and their protest this week in Evans Hall. I decided to swap out a 100-word story-of-the-day I had been including each day in the announcements with a free online book on African, African American, or Native American stories and storytelling. A new book. Every day. Free to read online.

For today's announcements, I featured Indian Tales of North America edited by Tristram Potter Coffin, and for tomorrow's announcements, I picked an African American book, Types and Distribution of Negro Folklore in America by Vivian Osborne Marsh. Those announcements are queued up for tomorrow, but not published yet, so here's a screenshot:

I don't usually make changes to class routines during the semester, but I was so impressed by the actions the students are taking in Evans Hall right now that I wanted to do something to contribute to that spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusion as part of my classes too, and by focusing on African American and Native American storytelling traditions every single day in the announcements, I can expand awareness of these traditions even more than happens already in class.

Adding these books to the daily announcements is not a big thing, I know, but in my opinion classes are made up of lots and lots of small things, and it is by making small changes like these, one by one by one, that we can come closer to our big goals.

I'll say something about that kind of incremental course design in another post.

Meanwhile, I am very glad that Vivian Osborne Marsh will be presiding over my class announcements tomorrow. If you check back at the Daily Announcements after midnight Oklahoma time tonight, you'll see her there. :-)