This piece is part of a series by participants in the Spring 2024 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Priscilla Bustamante is a mixed methods researcher, educator, and PhD Candidate in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center. Using research to aid activism and intersectional equity, she is broadly interested in the policing of race, class, gender, and sexuality; the critical psychology of oppression, resistance, and privilege; and the cumulative impacts of state-sanctioned dehumanization. Priscilla has taught at various schools and community-based organizations including Baruch College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Re-Imagining Psychology Education with OER

Growing up in New York City, I experienced vast educational disparities that were often reproduced in varying curricula, teaching styles, and access to academic knowledge. In various positions as an educator over the last decade, I have thus remained deeply committed to advancing intersectional equity in all educational settings. I was initially drawn to the Open Knowledge Fellowship because I believe being able to utilize open educational resources for the courses I teach is an important part of actualizing this commitment.

One of my goals as an educator has been to help my students develop healthier relationships to learning; to emphasize that learning is not about getting good grades, but about tapping into innate interests and getting excited about acquiring and creating new knowledge. Prioritizing student agency and strengthening research skills have been critical aspects of this work.

Throughout all my teaching, I continuously encourage my students to explore the topics they are most interested in. In doing so, I have witnessed the intellectual margins around their questions widen, and the development of more nuanced and accurate understandings of complex societal problems, to aid in re-imagining what alternatives might exist. Conceptually, OER can aid this process, prompting a more active method of learning by encouraging students to be curators and contributors. Teaching my students about open educational resources for their own future research and learning is another strategy by which I can help demystify the process of finding and creating the knowledge they seek for themselves.

During the Open Knowledge Fellowship, I learned how to find various types of open educational resources, assess the legitimacy of these sources, and incorporate OER into future courses. I also worked on a template for an introductory psychology course, and designed a virtual space for this OER syllabus to live.

The difficulties I encountered during this process were not all specific to OER, but rather were reflective of larger issues within the field of psychology. For one, I found it difficult to find sources for an introductory psychology course with a more critical focus. Introducing students to the discipline of psychology requires introducing them to the limitations of psychological perspectives alone, and the use of interdisciplinarity to strengthen psychological understandings. It also requires introducing students to the ways in which psychology as a discipline has been used to reproduce societal inequities historically and contemporarily. Ultimately, I found a few articles from Frontiers in Psychology and the Journal of Social and Political Psychology that complicate traditional psychological perspectives, introduce important psychosocial concepts such as intersectionality, and help students develop critical thinking skills.

As an Open Knowledge Fellow, I also grappled with the ways in which OER can be presented decontextualized, and thus run the risk of not only becoming less pedagogically effective, but also reproducing the very educational inequities intended to be reduced. I reflected on how designing and teaching an OER course presents an opportunity to discuss with my students ideas of accessibility, inclusivity, labor, and legitimacy in higher education, as well as how we might break down institutional barriers and cultures of elitism in academic spaces. OER raises the question of whose knowledge matters, challenging the notion that legitimate knowledge can only be produced by academically-recognized scholars in paywalled spaces. At the same time, the production of OER requires labor that is unpaid and largely unrecognized within the structure of academia. The ongoing pressure to publish peer-reviewed work to get and keep an academic job likely makes it even harder for marginalized scholars to contribute to OER.

Yet despite the real concerns and debates within the OER movement, I remain optimistic about the use of OER. Utilizing Open Educational Resources with intentional pedagogical approaches that privilege experiential knowledge—and allow instructors and students alike to embody values of exploration, empowerment, and equity—can be a powerful pairing. I am excited by the possibility of not only providing no-cost and accessible materials for my classes, but also helping my students grow their imagination of how various types of knowledge can be accessed, produced, disseminated, and utilized. Using and teaching them about open educational resources is another way I hope to deepen their understanding of the world around them and their collective capabilities to transform it.

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