Digital Promise -- an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit organization that is passionately committed to spurring innovation in education to improve opportunities for all learners -- is leading a cohort of 13 public school districts invested in developing OER professional development and classroom resources for engaging middle and high school students in racial equity and social justice discourse. We believe teachers need increased cultural competency, capacity, and resources to effectively integrate racial and social justice into teaching and learning to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student body.
Cohort participants will engage in our Digital Promise Inclusive Innovation process to develop equity-centered solutions. In this model, innovation is defined as differentiated, novel, and radical solutions that are co-designed and co-created with historically marginalized populations to address challenges as they see them and as they deem important. Success is defined by systemically marginalized populations having full access to, participating in, and benefiting from powerful learning outcomes, among both those involved in co-design and those to whom the innovation scales.
The Inclusive Innovation model aims to: 1) increase capacity of communities and practitioners to engage with research and evidence; 2) increase understanding and application of cultural context; 3) design equitable solutions to challenges; 4) foster long-term mutual cross-sector partnerships; and 5) promote sustainability and scalability.
Co-design teams begin the Inclusive Innovation journey by building relationships through trust and commitment to an equity-first R&D process. They then engage in inquiry to understand the local community and its assets, explore challenges related to project goals, dig into root causes, define the priority problem, and develop success metrics. Next, co-design teams engage in designing and developing solutions using a recursive build-measure-learn cycle. Once a working prototype has been developed, teams implement it, analyze its impact, and make adjustments, as needed. Finally, teams focus on sustaining and scaling their solutions.
While a variety of organizations currently provide resources for teachers and students to address social justice and racial equity issues, none of these are explicitly OER and many were not co-designed with the community or with today's increasingly diverse student population in mind. As a result, many do not provide authentic opportunities for students to express themselves and take action. OER provide unique opportunities for local collaboration and customization to enable teachers and students to respond in real time to local and national events and to take action to promote racial equity and social justice in their communities.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Recognize the need for OER professional development and classroom resources to increase teachers’ cultural competency and capacity to effectively integrate racial equity and social justice into teaching and learning;
- Understand how to apply a model for implementing equity-first R&D projects that brings together educators and community partners as co-designers;
- Hear directly from a student and educators about why they consider this work so important;
- Access resources to learn more about Inclusive Innovation and OER to promote racial equity and social justice discourse and action.
