CCCOER’s Open For AntiRacism Receives Significant Funding For Years 4 and 5

Open Education Global’s CCCOER launched the 4th year of the Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program. OFAR supports Antiracist Classrooms in California’s Community Colleges and has been awarded $998,000 for Years 4 and 5.

Open Education Global (OE Global) is excited to announce that the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) has begun the fourth year of a program that combats embedded racism and bias in teaching institutions. The program foregrounds explicit and implicit antiracist teaching practices and explores different methods and approaches for faculty at California Community Colleges to consider and implement. 

The Open for Anti-Racism (OFAR) program is a year-long intervention that guides faculty as they discover and use Open Educational Resources (OER) and open pedagogy as tools for implementing antiracist teaching practices and creating teaching materials. It begins with a 6-week online course where faculty learn about antiracism, OER, and open pedagogy and produce an action plan to implement antiracist pedagogy with their students the following semester. 

The program was envisioned in the summer of 2020 on the premise that faculty wanted to transform their classrooms to be antiracist but needed training and tools and that OER and open pedagogy could provide those tools.  Over the past three years, the OFAR program has worked with over 150 faculty at nearly 40 colleges, impacting over 4,000 California Community College System students. 

OFAR participant David Chávez Méndez, Ph.D. (he/him), History and Ethnic Studies Instructor at Compton College, explained that “OFAR has allowed me to see how anti-racist pedagogy is essential in supporting students by having accessible and affirming curriculum, course design, and approaches in the classroom. It has made me rethink and redesign my courses and continue to center my objectives around anti-racist frameworks. Finally, it has inspired me to serve on our institutional OER committee to start building our campus capacity to support anti-racist OER adoption.”

Institutional support and the impact of antiracist teaching have been enhanced by moving to a college team model.  Previous participants are tapped as advisors for new, larger cohorts, enabling the program to expand and extend leadership opportunities. Faculty use of OER continues to increase, and administrators are supporting participating teams so that they can share their learnings.

In the third-year assessment, 96% of participants stated that Open Pedagogy had positively impacted their teaching practices. The participants reported that the most effective strategy was incorporating student voices to bring in non-mainstream perspectives and points of view.

“We were excited to see that faculty confidence in discussing and implementing antiracist strategies with their students grew over 50%  and is a skill they can take forward,” explained Una Daly

As an openly licensed curriculum, the project is poised to influence any individuals or institutions who wish to download and adopt OFAR’s freely available materials. Multiple institutions have adapted the curriculum to implement antiracist teaching practices in their systems. 

California has the largest community college system in the United States, serving 1.9 million students at 116 colleges. 69% of California Community Colleges students are people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and 47% of students do not pay fees. 29% of University of California and 51% of California State University graduates started at a California community college.

OFAR is led by the Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources (CCCOER) at Open Education Global and the College of the Canyons, with generous funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

OEG Voices – Latest Podcasts

OE Global Voices

Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org

OEG Voices 076: Purvi Shah on Storyweaver

In this episode we take you to Bangalore, India to hear about a remarkable publisher, Pratham Books and its Open Education for Excellence Award winning platform Storyweaver, core to Pratham’s mission of a book in the hands of every child in the country, published in that child’s mother tongue.

We welcomed in the studio Purvi Shah, Senior Director of StoryWeaver & Strategy to tell use the story of Storyweaver, which was recognized with a 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Repository category. At this time, StoryWeaver offers now over 64,000 stories in more than 370 languages spoken around the world, and offers a place for anyone to contribute images, new translations, and also age and subject specific teaching resources. All of this came about from a bold commitment in 2004 from Pratham Books to embrace open licensing for their published storybooks.

StoryWeaver web site with menu items Read, Translate, Create, Resources, and Discover. One of the rotating banner displays a graphic style image of a teacher reading a book to her students with text: ”Storyweeaver in School, For Educators- We've worked with teachers so closely over the years that we've built these resources to be of real help. You'll find this section packed with stories, themes, activities, and more - all carefully ordered by grade and reading level.From language acquisition and reading comprehension, to textbook concepts and ideas, we'll help you nurture the joy of reading among all your students.”
https://storyweaver.org.in/

Enjoy the enthusiasm in Purvi’a voice as she shares the missions and global reach of StoryWeaver, as well as sharing examples of her favorite titles. And we appreciate the serendipty, than when Purvi offered to read a selection of a favorite story, from among the 60,000 titles in StoryWeaver, the one she chose was What Will Today Bring? authored by someone we know well here at OEGlobal, University of Leeds open educator Chrissi Nerantzi.

We also want to thank Sreemoyee Mukherjee from Pratham Books who joined us in the studio and was instrumental in coordinating this conversation.

In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In this episode of OEGlobal Voices, host Alan Levine engages in an inspiring conversation with Purvi Shah, a key member of the StoryWeaver initiative by Pratham Books in India. StoryWeaver, a community-driven digital platform, earned the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Curation Repository category.

Key Highlights:

  1. Embracing Openness: Purvi discusses the organization’s decision to adopt open licensing to reach their mission of putting a book in every child’s hand. This shift from a traditional publishing model to an open platform allowed the community to create and translate stories, leading to the birth of StoryWeaver.
  2. The Genesis of StoryWeaver: The platform was launched on International Literacy Day in 2015 with 800 stories in 24 languages. Today, it boasts an impressive collection of 60,000 stories in 370 languages, serving as a vast repository of multilingual and multicultural stories.
  3. Innovative Features: StoryWeaver includes unique features such as “read-alongs,” which combine audio, video, and same-language subtitling to aid language learning and literacy. The platform also offers structured resources for teachers, such as thematic book lists and STEM programs.
  4. Translations and Impact: Purvi shares stories about the extensive translations available on the platform. “Rani’s First Day at School” has been translated into 138 languages, demonstrating the community’s active participation. She also narrates heartwarming anecdotes about how these stories have impacted children and teachers around the world.
  5. Community Contributions: The discussion highlights how users can contribute by translating stories or creating new ones using the platform’s vast library of images and easy-to-use creation tools. Purvi shares examples of innovative projects inspired by StoryWeaver, such as a literacy program developed in Mexico.
  6. Future Goals: Looking ahead, Purvi emphasizes the importance of expanding the depth of stories in each language and leveraging the community’s strengths to ensure that every child can access a book in their mother tongue.

Alan and Purvi’s conversation encapsulates the essence of open education and the incredible work being done by the StoryWeaver team to foster literacy and inclusivity. The episode concludes with a recommendation to explore StoryWeaver and an acknowledgment of the upcoming Open Education Awards.

Tune in to OEGlobal Voices to dive deeper into the world of StoryWeaver and the transformative power of open education.

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 76

How can we work with the communities to increase the depth of languages? So that could be a potential future milestone. We were just discussing this in office the other day that it’s so interesting that while the platform has 370 languages and that’s a milestone in itself, but the real milestone is that for that one child reading the first book in their mother tongue is really the milestone.

We hit that milestone almost every day because every day a child is discovering a book in their mother tongue for the first time. That milestone will never get old, I think. And some of the other sort of milestones [has] been just not being a platform where we allow for stories, but say, when we created this whole different platform, the white label StoryWeaver for Room to Read in Indonesia and that helped kickstart their own platform called Literacy Cloud.

That was a pretty important milestone because whatever we have learned, we could empower other organizations. to build off our investments, our learning, in countries that they work with.

Purvi Shah on StoryWeaver’s milestones


Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Fairytale Story by Serge Quadrado  licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The image of the reading octopus in this episode’s artwork was part of a previous version of the StoryWeaver web site, an illustration credited to Measa Sovonnarea.

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our showsWe have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descriptbut our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.