In our experience, copyright and intellectual property guidance to students often focuses on delineations of ownership, especially as it relates to what students can’t or shouldn’t do as content users, failing to engage in critical questioning and explicit challenging of the assumptions that underpin existing copyright legislation as well as learners’ varied relationships to copyrighted content. While it is important for students to understand the legal ramifications of the Copyright Act, additional layers of knowledge are required in the current educational environment. Beyond the educational use of content, many students will also need to navigate agreements and policies granting the use of their own work in contribution to institutional repositories or in other ways beyond the fulfillment of their program requirements, and negotiate their hold over their work while engaging with external third parties for research projects. How can we ensure students have adequate awareness to consider the downstream implications of these decisions?
What could a different sort of guide look like? One that envisions learners as more than passive consumers of content, but creators with agency as well? How might a student-facing copyright guide and related educational discussions empower original creation and assertion of intellectual property rights, rather than exclusively police learner behaviours?
In this brief Lightning Talk, we explore these concepts and elaborate on the opportunity to conceptualize a student-facing copyright guide rooted in emancipatory, de-colonized, critical frameworks. Additionally, we invite anyone who is interested to participate in an asynchronous sprint, an opportunity to contribute to a collaborative document that will capture our thoughts, questions, helpful resources, etc. - all CC BY licensed so that others can benefit from and build upon our contributions.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Consider the assumptions and values that underpin existing student-facing copyright guides
- Imagine what a reframed, recontextualized student-facing copyright guide might include if equity, diversity, and inclusion guided the content
- Participate in an asynchronous collaborative opportunity intended to share thoughts, questions, resources, etc. across a broad spectrum of collaborators
