Discussion Post 1 – Introductions

I am planning to convert my Interpersonal Communication course (SPE 12) to OER because the subject relies so heavily on real discussions and looking at lifelike examples of relationships and conflict. Honestly, I have seen so many textbooks that just feel outdated. I see dialogue that students can’t relate to, like “Oh Wilfred, you’re a pill,” or descriptions of women that feel stuck in the past. One text I was required to use in 2004 when I was first hired had 0% about computers or technology and used descriptions like – Jean is a working woman who is nearing middle age but she still cares about her appearance – What! huh! My students would think I’ve lost my mind if I had them work with this today and in ’04 they thought I wandered out of a 1950s fallout shelter to teach the course. I begged to change the book right after I signed my second year reappointment letter but this book is still in circulation and still dated. A lot of the speech curriculum feels built with a very specific “Midwest” mindset – White, suburban, US-born, and Christian – which doesn’t reflect the reality of my students. I have one class where a group of my students use the mid-class break to observe the call to Muslim prayer, while other students have shared about escaping the war and civil unrest in Ukraine and Haiti, and I also have students who are my age and came out as LGBTQ late in life – did I mention we are all immigrants to the US (including me) in this class. That said, I must say that as an LGBTQ person, I don’t relate to how sexuality is built into these current textbooks – it’s often presented with sterile, clinical definitions that can be quite binary.

One of my biggest frustrations with traditional publishers is how they isolate culture and gender into single chapters. Publishers often stick these topics in a safe-sell separate unit to ensure they can sell books in conservative states. But as my class shows, you don’t often have a class of all one perspective. Even my class where we are all immigrants, some want to protest ICE raids and travel bans while others speak in class the other night about us needing to close the border immediately to avoid being overrun by immigrants. There are also several perspectives in between – it makes for very interesting class discussions. So one major reason I want to move to OER so I can diversify the voices we use and spread those topics throughout the entire course and engage the nuance of differences and intersectionality that characterize every aspect of our communication.

Since I have a lot of experience adapting and creating materials, out of necessity, I feel like I can channel that into creating resources that will stand the test of time with regular updates, inclusion of new classes of students, and by seeing how others remix and blend my work with others. I have notices that even though I use a standard text currently, my students are already going online to avoid buying the book. For example, they might look up Gibb’s climate pairs for a paper, but sometimes they end up finding websites full of typos or mixed-up definitions. If I have more say in the OERs they have available to them, I can fix this misinformation and ensure they are getting quality content. My main question now is figuring out the fair use and copyright rules – how to properly cite the big theories and concepts while writing the content myself and finding open-source diagrams to go with them.

In sum, I look forward to learning more and learning from others as we move through the preparation steps together. I’m sure my first efforts will not be perfect but I suspect this will keep me involved in expanding and developing my work for years to come.