Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to OEG Voices. Speaker 2: OEG Voices. Speaker 3: OEG Voices. Speaker 4: OEG Voices. Speaker 5: A podcast bringing you to voices and ideas of open educators from around the world. Speaker 6: OEG Voices is produced by Open Education Global. Speaker 7: A member-based non-profit organization- Speaker 8: Supporting the development and use of open education globally. Speaker 1: Learn more about us at oeglobal.org. Speaker 11: There's much to take in at a global level. Speaker 12: We hope to bring you closer to how open education is worked. Speaker 13: By hearing the stories of practitioners. Speaker 14: Told in their own voices. Speaker 15: Each episode introduces you to a global open educator. Speaker 16: And we invite you to later engage in conversation with them. Speaker 17: In our OEG Connect Community. Alan Levine: Welcome to the OEG Voices Podcast, and I'm your host from Open Education Global. I'm Alan Levine and my real job is to press the recording button. I think I've done that already and I just want to say how excited I am to have our guest here and we'll introduce them in a second. But really, this all came when my colleague Unna Daly, hey Unna, she sent me a message and just asked if it was possible to do this and I was like, "Oh my gosh, possible? When can we do this?" So I'm really excited to have here today professors Vera Kennedy and Rowena Bermio from West Hills College, Lemoore, California, but they also teach elsewhere that they'll tell us about. And really we're here to talk about this fantastic open textbook that they've published and are using now, Our Lives: An Ethnic Studies Primer. And so we really just want to hear them talk about what came into creating that book and how they're using it in their teaching and sort the whole benefits and strengths of OERs behind it. With that, I might just ask Vera to just let us know, obviously who you are, where you are, and anything that we should really know about you. How many of those books and there's Snoopy on the shelf behind you I can see. Welcome to the show, Vera. Vera Kennedy: Thank you Alan, I appreciate it. Yes, I teach at West Hills College Lemoore. I teach sociology and ethnic studies. My background is actually in education. My doctorates in education, so I do... In the past I have taught some courses in teacher education as well, but I also am a lecturer at Fresno State where I teach sociology, but also diversity in the US and particularly race and ethnicity as well as things like deviance, social problems, those kinds of topics. Yes, I am a big Peanuts fan. At Peanuts, Snoopy always has my back, that's what I like to say. But back to OER, yes, I have written three OER books and one commercial textbook. I have enjoyed the process of authoring it. It's fun. I particularly like OER though because it is a living document, I feel. Even as you know we publish and release something as I use it in the classroom, it evolves constantly. I'm getting excited because I think it's getting time for a couple of those to get updates. So new versions, so I'll be able to take some of those learnings that I have and experiences from my students and adapt some of those books. Yeah, that's just a little bit about me and my dabble in OER. Alan Levine: That's great. It sounds like a bit more than a dabble in- Vera Kennedy: At least a decade, Vera, at least. Alan Levine: Way more than everybody else in the room, I think so. Hello to Rowena and also introduce yourselves and also I didn't ask Vera, but either one of you, tell us a little also about West Hills College Lemoore and where that is in the world because we had this huge global audience. Rowena Bermio: Vera, do you want to talk about West Hills before I get into myself? Vera Kennedy: Sure. West Hills College, Lemoore is in the Central Valley of California. It's primarily a rural community, a small town, but we're a commuter college. Because of its location, it's about 40 miles north of Fresno, California, big city, bigger than Detroit now I hear, bigger than St. Louis. So it's got a huge population, but we have a lot of small rural towns, agricultural-based type towns that a lot of our students come from. So they're quite diverse, different backgrounds. That's a little about Lemoore. Lemoore was one of the first community colleges in California to go OER. I'm happy to say I was the first adopter on our campus. And then I helped recruit and spread the word about OER on our campus. But we have pretty progressive faculty because we are a small campus that we're family. We talk a lot, we share a lot. We like to be in each other's space as far as what everybody's doing with the pedagogy and observing and things like that. That once some of us got into it, it kind of spread. We saw the value for our students and access, especially because our students tend to be from impoverished communities. Being able to have access to materials the first day and also being able to integrate their voices in OER and share those with other faculty who are teaching the same discipline and things like that. That gives you kind of a snapshot of West Hills. We were the zero textbook leader here in California for the most recent years where we've been helping to train other faculty throughout the state in adopting, authoring, you name it, licensing, whatever it is. Yes. Been very active and we're excited to be part of the big OER community. Alan Levine: That's great. Rowena Bermio: Thank you Vera. I knew you'd be able to do that a lot better than I would. I'm a little bit newer to West Hills than Vera. Vera's had a long history there. But hi, I'm Rowena Bermio. I've been teaching at West Hills for a few years now and I primarily teach history and now have delved into ethnic studies and I also teach at Fresno State. Me and Vera teach the same diversity in America of course now. So that's kind of where I got my start in really thinking about ethnic studies and how I got into coming to write this OER. This is my first foray into OER and I came into the culture of OER at West Hills, which was something actually pretty new to me. I was used to being at Fresno State and having your physical textbook and coming into that culture of learning about OER and now authoring one was something pretty new to me and I really do love it. It's so adaptive. In my own teaching, I'm very adaptive to what's going on. Just currently my students are bringing up Iran to me and asking questions about what the protests there mean and I can adapt and kind of see how that works within my own teaching. I love OER for that adaptive application to teaching. Alan Levine: Well, thank you. It's really ideal to have someone in your position who has really taken us on and can speak to what it means to make that change over. Obviously, West Hills is a great place to get that start. I'm completely rude as my host, I didn't give a chance for you Unna to say hello and introduce yourself. Una Daly: Well, thank you, Alan. I'd be happy to just say hello. I think most people know I'm the Director of the Community College Consortium for OER. And in that capacity I got to know Vera. I'm going to say actually, Vera, I think we met before achieving the dream OER degree through Cool for Ed because I know that you were active in that and I worked on that project back in, I'm going to say 2014. It was way back. Vera Kennedy: Thanks for giving this up Una, thank you for that. Una Daly: I've been an admirer of Vera's for a long time. But I recently met Rowena and I'm so impressed with her work too and her thoughtfulness around how she approaches this with her students. I had the pleasure of doing a panel with her at the CAL OER Conference in August with several other community colleges were represented as well. The thing that inspires me so much about West Hills is not only the amazingly dedicated faculty dedicated to student success for their very diverse population, but at the administrative level, they have support and they've had that for a long time and they even have a board of trustee policy around OER and they have a very impressive commitment to move all their general Ed to OER within a very short time period. And they've made some really significant progress towards meeting that goal. Alan Levine: That's so good. It really speaks to what community colleges are all about. There's so many... Vera and I were talking like how do we even figure what to talk about? I know we'd like to get to how it got started, but I just thought, because when I first looked at the book and because I'm always focused on imagery, is the photo on the cover. It had to be a hard choice to select a photo to represent everything that's in that book. Can you talk about that image and why you felt like it was the right photo to represent the ethnic studies primer? Vera Kennedy: Yeah, I think we had the same philosophy throughout the whole book, is what images provide voice or sometimes voice has been absent or ignored. And so looking... It's hard. I think it's become easier, in the most recent years, to find images that are open and people have openly licensed them that represents all the different minority groups or underrepresented groups in the US. We try to do that but make it natural. The cover, yes, represent some ethnic culture to it, but as you look through the book, all the images represent the major under represented groups. But in a frame of normality, in other words, living life like anyone would live life, one of the comments I received early on when our faculty reviewers were basically giving us feedback about the content. There were some comments made about the images. The one that stood out to me was that they absolutely loved... We have an image of somebody who's disabled, but it was... You could look at the image and you could tell that's not why we picked it. You could tell by the image that it was about somebody working on a laptop who happened to be disabled. It wasn't in an exploitive way, it was very much in the normal context of living life and doing things in life. We have a lot of images like that that represent different groups and different people, but they're just living daily life like we all have to do and trying to portray that inclusive environment, that we are all living life. And then this is just our stories of the lives we've lived and the experiences we've had. Is that a good way to sum it up, Rowena? Rowena Bermio: Yeah, I really like that. And it intersects with the title itself, Our Lives. And that was a philosophy that we agreed on, me and Vera pretty early on. Something that I have adopted in my teaching for a while now, it's that the history of this country is all of ours and we're really thinking about that type of inclusiveness and it comes from those perspectives of people that are often left out of the textbooks. That was what we wanted to portray here. While there are some darker concepts that are covered in the book, especially the histories, we still have voices that shine through that are simply our voices, which was Our Lives. And that's kind of how the framework of it continues throughout the book. This is our story. Our story, our narrative. Vera Kennedy: And also making it relatable that this is our story, but you can understand our story because we all have faced different struggles and things and we wanted you to understand our struggle because throughout history, we always showed the struggles of one dominant majority group. It's important for everybody to know the struggles of the minority groups. But that we're still all relatable, that we can be empathetic and develop that understanding. Rowena Bermio: One of those questions that I continually ask in my teaching is, "What is an American? What does that mean?" I've always asked my students that and they always come back with, it has to do with a piece of paper, the legalities of it. But it's so much richer than that and that's kind of one of the ways that I wanted life to be represented in the book. Vera as well. We had that shared philosophy going into the book as a whole, all the perspectives. And specifically even West Hills faculty and staff perspectives. Peppered throughout the book are these biological reflections that actually come from faculty and staff that are represented in the book. That was really important to us too. Alan Levine: I'm already jumping off script, but that was my favorite part of going through the book, when I saw there was a yellow box on the page that was going to have one of those reflections. And so I hope we can talk about too what it took to get those. Una Daly: Yeah, with regards to what Rowena had to say that what is an American, it's a very interesting question because when we look at our icons, you think of Uncle Sam and think of the people who are represented on our stamps, changing a little bit now, but our money, they don't really look like the majority of Americans do they? Those icons are very limited. Anyway, I wanted to ask you to explain and I know you have done this with me before, but what were the motivations for developing the primer? Why you two? So kind of a little two questions there, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about that. Rowena Bermio: Motivations is again what we've already talked about, the culture of OER already on our campus. But also, this law that was passed in California, this ethnic studies requirement, that was a big motivating factor there, that all students have to take an ethnic studies class as part of the academic breath to either transfer or graduate. That's a big motivating factor there as well. This need to develop an ethnic studies course, all of that kind of work together in needing to develop that on our campus. The idea that there was not an OER out there that covered what would be needed to cover in this ethnic studies course was a motivating factor. As to Vera and I's involvement... Well, I can only speak to mine obviously. Vera has so much experience with OER. Mine came from, I was an active participant in a social justice and equity task force on associated with our campus and I gave several talks about ethnic heritage and heritage months that are celebrated throughout the year. Like for instance, right now we're in the midst of Hispanic Heritage month and that kind of highlighted my presence as a part-time faculty person at West Hills. I got kind of noticed by I guess other faculty and staff and was identified as a person who could possibly co-write this with Vera. That's kind of how I got involved in this project. Vera Kennedy: I would say my motivation for getting involved, just wanting to work with somebody and developing the curriculum was part of it. That's my teacher hat, being excited to be involved in something that our campus hadn't done. And for me personally, I've always been a big advocate of racial and social justice. It's not just what I taught but my life before a teacher. I was an advocate both in juvenile justice and mental health and foster care, which is predominantly, you see many people of color. For me it's always a hat that I wore and teaching sociology and teacher education and things like that. I was happy to be involved in the pedagogy of it, being able to be part of crafting what that curriculum might look like, what was missing... At one point, it's been a long history, but at one point we did have ethnic studies offered. That faculty member left for health reasons and it would've been years since anyone had been recruited or we developed the program or anything. It was nice to be in involved and have a voice myself feel, like I had a voice in that and where we could help the institution go with it and build the program, but also bring the experiences of being a faculty member of color and working with students and seeing what it is that might help them feel included regardless of their racial ethnic background. How could they learn about these topics, but still feel like they had a voice without feeling guilt, without feeling shame, without reliving trauma, that's a big one for people of color. Yeah, I was just as excited just what the project was in itself and what it meant for teaching. Una Daly: For those who aren't familiar with the book, would one of you be okay sharing... Sort of the requirement from CSU was that you had to focus on one of the four traditional racial ethnic groups, correct? Would you be okay with sharing what those are so that people who aren't familiar with it- Vera Kennedy: Yes. When you teach the course, they give you the option of focusing on one racial group. When we wrote the text though, we decided to go ahead and embrace all four. Somebody who might want to use it, they could use a segment of it and build from it. Or if somebody wanted more comprehensive class to show a little bit, lends from each of those groups, they could. And the groups are the Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and we use the term Latinx Americans, even though there is some controversy in the language for all the terms really, to be honest with you, there is controversy on how groups identify and then what the CSU requirement is. We had a lot of conversations on that as well. We went based on what it was. For curriculum getting approved through the CSU system, we did go towards more the faculty academic side of the language, but did try to put an explanation at the beginning of the book, why we chose the terms that we used and how they're presented. But even in my classes as I'm teaching now, I will have people of the different groups speak their voice and share how they want to be addressed in the class rather than how it might be presented in the book. We're open to those. That should be part of the entire teaching process for everyone. Ro, did you have anything you wanted to add about that? Rowena Bermio: No, I mean that was a beautiful explanation of the whole thing. I think it can be really organic when taught. On paper of course, we had to identify the four groups, but in class I give a lot of room for my students to self-identify and tell me the terms that they prefer to use rather than those that are considered academic or imposed by society. I find it really important that they can self-identify and understand the importance of that in general, having their own voice. But for administrative purposes and to have curriculum review, of course, we have to use those categorical words. Alan Levine: When you sat down and said, "Okay, we're going to write a textbook." From the beginning, what was your process to figure out how to build this open textbook? Vera Kennedy: We developed a process. To be honest with you, it was a different experience for me too writing any other book. One of my books I did write in a team and the other two I did alone. So those were different. But just the topic itself, knowing what it had to encompass and that we wanted to touch on all the learning outcomes that the CSU was requiring because we wanted a book that could be adaptable for anyone if they wanted to focus on one outcome. We still had to represent that outcome in the book. We had to take a more comprehensive, broad approach to it. B. Ut we had to kind of design our own process. And we did that by saying, "Hey, let's meet and let's design a process." We actually received support from our institution to have our own in-service day to meet and say, "How are we going to do this?" We gave our own time and hours to saying okay, let's go do research first because we are experts in what we've been teaching. But neither one of us ever felt like we were an expert in ethnic studies. And so we gave ourselves time to go look at the literature, what is out there and not just current trends, but what's the foundation. Because we had decided early on that that's what we were going to focus on the book, that this is an intro course, we want the foundation. We know we're not going to touch every current issue or current topic. That in itself, it's too living. We would change every week, we would have to change the book every week. So we went with foundation, what are the terms and concepts that need to be in the foundation of the book and then what are the histories, what do we know? What are the gaps in the student's history curriculum that aren't being shared? That's I think how we did it first, Ro, was just kind of researching and put together a framework of different topics. I think then we continued to meet, we would kind of hone those in and identify okay, how are we going to present this then? And Ro was phenomenal in coming up with the ideas on how she wanted to present the history that and that she was going to copy that for every group so that you knew as you read the book, how the history of every group was going to be revealed and discussed and those kinds of things. Alan Levine: I want to let Ro respond, but also just to say I noticed right away this design approach to put the terms up front but not explicitly define them, which leaves room then to have conversation about them. That was a really different approach than I've seen in a lot of textbooks. Kudos to you for coming up with that. Vera Kennedy: Thank you. I think we both are very direct in how we communicate. We tried to do that. We wanted to make it a book where we could still use the vocabulary and diction of the academic setting because students have to learn the words that are... As they go on in the curriculum or they go on in the institution or the program. But we also wanted to be direct in our explanations and not trying to get muddled, make things muddled or things like that. I think that's the kind of approach that we have when we communicate. We try to display that in our writing. Right off from the bat, at the very beginning, Ro asked me about my experience writing and what worked best and I told her what I found was we start with my lecture notes. What do I say when I walk in the classroom? Write that down. And then from there, you can fill in the gaps. With the research, the evidence or develop it however you need to. But that's, I think, the advice I gave her and I think that's kind of how we started at first is what do we do when we're actually in front of the students? What do we say? Put that on paper and then develop it from there. Rowena Bermio: Yeah, it's interesting that you noticed about the vocabulary in the beginning. That was definitely purposeful and we built the book for it to build on each other. The first couple of chapters are so foundational, they're sociological terms, they're the foundation of ethnic studies. So some of the earliest vocabulary terms are like what is race? A lot of students don't even have a good understanding of what that is, a social construction. Just starting with those terms that gives the foundation and then we can get into the historical content, which was intentional. My building of the story kind of goes along with how I teach history anyways. Starting with Native Americans and going into African Americans, it's kind of the continuity of history. Native Americans were here already. African Americans forced migrations and then we get into the other two groups, Asian Americans and Latinx Americans, which are... They can go in either order, but their participation and acknowledgement in the country was a little bit, I guess complicated to say the least. In terms of the history, it was really hard for me to pick and choose and we were trying to be very succinct with the way that we presented the narrative. So I could go on forever as many instructors could about their love of their own subject, their own discipline. But I was intentional in picking things that don't necessarily make a US history survey. I tried to, yes, give a clear narrative but also pick and choose certain things that maybe students have never heard before. Alan Levine: As first time OER textbook author, how is this at the beginning for you? Rowena Bermio: Incredibly difficult. I'm saying that because of my own just personality. I want things to be the best. As I sit down to write it, if it's not coming out good right away, I'm thinking, "This is terrible, I can't even do this." Just starting out was the hardest thing for me. But once you get flowing, we were talking about things we could kind of show each other drafts and things like that. That really helped. Vera was so helpful in that process. Just that piece of advice of start with your lecture notes, that was invaluable to me and being able to start to write. I really followed her lead as we went along the way. Una Daly: I appreciate you sharing that. I don't think I've heard that from OER authors, start with your lecture notes. And it makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the peer review process as well. Can you talk a little bit about using the IDEA framework, the inclusion, diversity, equity and anti-racism framework from the California State Community College Academic Senate, and how that process worked? Because I know Vera, you've gone through peer review with other textbooks that you've developed, either by yourself or in a team. What was different about this process? Vera Kennedy: The whole thing. I think learning too about peer review, having done it before, I've served on several peer review. You're right, cool for ED is how we met. That was my first peer review experience. That's how I started in OER. I peer reviewed it and then that's how I adopted because I had seen them and I could evaluate them. But over time too, I've been doing a lot in pedagogical training on campus. So teaching other faculty. I learned about peer review and then I realized that a lot of it is not helpful. Ro and I would talk about what kind of feedback do we need? What do we want from this? And we designed our own process where we said okay, we want several members and some represented based on the discipline itself, but others that aren't because we want to know how it's going to be received by the audience. We were careful in who we invited because we wanted some diversity on our team and I don't mean diversity as racial ethnic diversity because that doesn't exist as so much on my campus, but in mindfulness and experience, those kinds of things. We put together a team and we did use the typical rubric from the online education initiative. We used that. But we also used the idea and that's part of... Because Ro and I had been attending different meetings related to ethnic studies, including those hosted by the academic senate. I had seen the framework as they were developing it and thought, "This is right on, this is what we want not just in our textbook but in our classes." Luckily, they had completed the initial, I say first version of it. It was available for us to share with our peer reviewers and we asked our peer reviewers to do something different, which was not... Typically, a peer reviewer will get a book or a course and they get the rubric and they rate it and they send it back to you and you look at it. We didn't want that. We wanted a dialogue with them just kind of like we want our students to dialogue about race and racism. We asked them to review it on their own, so they had a week to review it with the rubrics. And then we asked our institution to pay them for an in-service day. They came on an in service day and they met together and went over their reviews and talked about them. We had a lead facilitator, they facilitated those meetings. We were not in them. We let them discuss the book first and identify what it was that they thought they should share with us and why was it important to share and modifications we needed to make or revisions or those kinds of things. At the end of those days, there was two days. So at the end of those days, then we were invited to attend at the end of the meeting and that's where they had the dialogue with us. They went through everything that they saw that should be shared or just even insights to make us aware, "Hey, this really works. Keep it in there or move this around." Anything that they had to tell us. And that was the most effective for us because not only could we hear it, we could ask questions about it. And it inspired, it helped us brainstorm too, it gave us ideas on how to make revisions. Anything to add, Ro, to that? I know that was kind of a long explanation about how we did it. Rowena Bermio: No, I mean just the process. It was all completely new to me. But I think it was just so helpful to have a variety of disciplines that were represented in that review process and have them give us that feedback. That was really helpful because our students are going to be a similar response in a way to have that wide breath of experience with the content and then be able to just react real time to what they just consumed. I found that really helpful Vera Kennedy: As an author too, we wanted to know how it was going to be received by White Voice to be honest with you. And so we wanted that feedback. Are we pushing too far? Are we not pushing enough? Those kinds of things as well. And how do we manage it? Because it didn't mean we weren't going to push, but it was like, hey, how do we follow up based on how this is presented? Or does there need to be an application, an exercise here to instill something? Those are the kind of things that we did. So we didn't shy away from anything we thought should be in there, but hearing the different perspectives and knowing the background of the faculty members and how diverse in their experience, we were able to get that to help us understand content-wise, where we should go, which direction we should go if it needed more or needed less, those kinds of things. Una Daly: This was developed as part of the CC ECHO program. This textbook received funding from that program. And of course, in fact, I think you were the first textbook within the program to go through a peer review. I don't know if you want to speak to what CC ECHO is. I think I can actually say what it stands for, the California Community College... Oh gosh- Alan Levine: Consortium. Una Daly: Equitable Change in at Hispanic serving institutions using OER roughly. But it has the lens for all of the materials that are being developed of diversity, equity and inclusion. And I think they would say anti-racism as well. There is a rubric now that has combined both the OEI rubric that you mentioned earlier, the Online Education Initiative with the IDEA framework that was put together by Kelsey Smith, the OER librarian at West Hills. And so I think your project may have been the first one to go through that process. Vera Kennedy: Yeah, it was exciting though because that's where we got the ideas about imagery, what images are in there, how we're using language, how the approach to language. Knowing that we lose students just in the academic dialogue. Even now as we're teaching the course, I will have students read segments or parts of the applications out loud and you can hear the... How would you say it? The delay and understanding, maybe not the experience using the vocabulary. But then that's becomes part of the dialogue, which I think is... You and I talked about, Una, for a while when I was working on OER and we were working on OER, we're like okay, next we're finally at the point where we're going to talk about equity and materials. Because before it was just, let's get people to create, share. Let's get people to adopt. But then it became to how now do we make sure that materials that are created have an equity lens to them? That's always been an important to me. But it's difficult to do because of our academic training. You have to think about the institution and the models that we've been training do kind of institutionalize White supremacy. How do you break that down though to make an equitable resource, not just say it's free, but actually make its content equitable but still be considered academic. That's a balance. I think the IDEA framework is a way to think about as you're creating materials, the things to keep in mind as you're developing, as you're picking out imagery. I recommend it like anybody. Even if you're developing an exercise, to use that framework because it does make you think about how are you including every student in the class, no matter who they are, how they identify, how are you making sure they feel like they're part of the learning process? Una Daly: How do you include scholars of color who maybe haven't been in the textbooks? Vera Kennedy: Exactly. Or even participate in class dialogue. There's a few activities that I've been doing around the book that's around that. Some of my students have expressed frustration and anxiety because I will put them in their racially identified group and they're saying, "This is a diversity class. Shouldn't we all be working together? That's how we learn from differences and opinion." And I have to remind them that what you just shared comes from a framework of privilege. Because we have students that have never felt comfortable being able to share in the group for not even just based on diversity, just being welcome to share. Helping them see that some students need time first to share where it's safe, build up confidence, self esteem, then they can share with the diverse group. It's like those kinds of things is what we've put as part of the book, but that we also hope that re-instill what's happening in the pedagogy side in the classroom. Una Daly: Yeah, that's really important and I know Alan has a question about that coming up soon about what you've learned from teaching this and with your students, what you're learning and what I think is really important to communicate with other faculty who will be using these materials, what to look for, how to respond to students who express that frustration in a way that's constructive and keeps everybody moving forward. Alan Levine: I just want to say the framework is really comprehensive and practical at the same time. Did you get substantial amounts of feedback that you then had to incorporate? Vera Kennedy: Yes, I think so. I think we did a good job aligning the materials with the framework, but just because the diverse audience of peer reviewers, you're going to get feedback, which is what you want. This is some of my... I think my frustration in the past with peer review is I never got anything. I would get, "Great job!" Good job for going ahead and doing it. That does not help me make it better or put it out globally. I know other people are going to look at it. So I want it to be the best that it could be at that moment. I felt like through this process, we were able to get that. It took us a while to get through the feedback, right Ro? Rowena Bermio: Yeah. The process of answering and making adjustments where we thought appropriate, adopting the changes that were suggested. We again had another long dialogue about those things as well. Are these changes necessary? Are reviewers giving us useful constructive criticism? For the most part they were. I think that the changes that we made were useful. We even kind of reordered part of the book, I think after that review. Vera Kennedy: I want to bring that up too, Ro, because you mentioned that our process was that we communicated the entire time. We had a regular meeting schedule and we met even if we hadn't got anywhere. Both of us had... You give blocks and there's other things that happen because we're both teaching full time, so sometimes you don't get as far as you wanted to. But it didn't matter. We kept almost all of our meetings and it was always just dialoguing about it, even if we didn't feel we were making progress, there was still always something to talk about. After the peer review, yes we did meet and talk about what do we change then and how do we do it now that we have the feedback. And then we gave ourselves some writing time again before it went to the editor who did all the grammar stuff, those kinds of things. Alan Levine: Now, if I understand this is your second year of teaching with the book. Can you share about what it takes or how you go about adapting or integrating? The textbook is not the course, integrating it and what kind of the way you build the activities that are written into the book as discussion prompts. It'd be interesting to hear about your class strategies for having students engage with the content and the discussions. Vera Kennedy: You want to go first, Ro? Because you've been teaching it longer than I have. Rowena Bermio: Sure. Yeah. The first course was a summer course that I taught, so it's actually only been a couple of semesters now and it was a very, very small class which made some of the activities a little bit difficult. But all around, I think it was a very positive response. Students were so grateful of hearing these voices. They particularly really enjoyed as most people have responded to the biographical stories that we have in there. I had some really great responses to that. Currently, how I'm using it in the classroom is I'm using pieces of it in the diversity class that both Vera and I mentioned. I'm using it like a true OER. I'm picking and choosing and remixing pieces of it as I see fit. One of the things that, I think this was a production of Vera's imagination, but having the reflections as an exercise, I took that, it's something I've kind of been doing in the classroom and I took that and really embraced it in my teaching. A whole nother subject, I've been doing kind of this grading with lots of reflective exercises. That's been a learning process of myself and my own pedagogy that really works with the material. I took it to kind of another level. Vera Kennedy: So my experience is a little bit different than it. I'm teaching three different classes, ethnic studies, intro to ethnic studies, the diversity class. It's an upper division class and I have an upper division race and ethnicity class. And I'm using the text in three different courses, but using it as the foundation. So the upper division classes, there are other readings, other research, peer-reviewed articles, things like that. In the intro to ethnic studies, I'm only using that text. But Ro and I teach different and it's just as it is with every teacher, I'm more an experiential teacher. So I'm one of those I don't lecture. I create experiences for my students and we live those through activities, which is kind of seen in the vision of the applications in the book to give somebody some tools that they could do in the classroom. But how I do them and I don't even use all those in the book, I use other ones, but I try to create experiences through activities for my students to do. And then they reflect on them, they reflect on them sometimes together, sometimes individually, sometimes in a class discussion. But it's always about having them take ownership of their learning for me. I expect them give them the readings, I grade them, I have them do different things with them. There are the typical assignments in what we would call our canvas, our online course that they do that I grade. But when we meet, it's all about activities. I design activities for them to do. They go in breakout rooms, they come back because I'm teaching primarily remotely. But I do the same if I was in the classroom, it's the way I used to teach before. They would just break out in groups in the classroom. I wander around to the different groups and I answer questions and I ask them questions and give them a lot of time to talk things over. And then we come back, we'll discuss them. But they do do reflections. Every week there's a reflection. I don't open it up until we're done with class meetings, but then that's the assignment is to go back and to discuss what they learned, what was challenging. In these classes, I particularly ask about trigger moments. What are those trigger moments that made you feel anxious, confused, frustrated? How is it going to change you? How is it affecting your thinking behavior, those kinds of things. Alan Levine: I was wondering because the biographical reflections in the book came from faculty colleagues. Any thought to gathering or collecting some student stories that could add to that vein? Because to hear it from a current student context who's just coming into their adulthood, that can be interesting too. Vera Kennedy: Yeah, I think that's always been the goal is to integrate the student voice. For us it was not having the class yet, so who do you ask to do it? I think after you have a cohort of students or two go through them, then you can ask past students to integrate. It was hard to ask students to disclose or open up about these topics without a context to it. They're not sure how it's going to be used, why it would be used. So it's easier now that it's out. We're using it to go to students and ask them to be part of it. That's difficult when you're developing it. It hasn't been taught, we weren't using it, those kinds of things. But there's also some desire to expand to get a voice from the Native American community, which we talked a little bit about, Alan, which has been challenging for us. And it's going to be challenging even on a student level, which is understandable. There are feelings of distrust and it's not just about us. We have students, we know faculty, we know people in the community, but it's historical distrust about how a book might be used, who's really getting compensated and should they be compensated rather than it be free? There's just a long history and trauma associated with things like that. We know in time, we'll be able to add those voices. But I think it's just like with all the students in our class, people need to see that it's out there, how it's being used, that there's no malice or anything that's hidden. There's no hidden uses or hidden compensation or things like that, that it really is a teaching and learning tool. I think they will find people, all kinds of people that be willing to share their stories and that we could build maybe in the second, third edition, things like that. Una Daly: Thank you for sharing all those ideas for future revisions. They sound amazing, the student stories and trying to get more involvement with the Native American community as well. I wonder about... I think I asked you guys this in the summer, now really the book was completed, it was published this summer. Like August was it, or July. Yeah. So it's very recent. But I know that all of our colleges in California now need to offer something like this for their transfer students or if they're four year institutions, they need to offer it there. I wonder this podcast is a piece of that, but how we might be able to help with that or how would you like to see other faculty find out about this and engage with the materials? Do you have any thoughts about that? Vera Kennedy: Yes, I think just word of mouth that it's available out there. We've tried to share with people that where they can access it, that it's available in three different formats. There is the PDF, there's the Pressbooks version as well as [inaudible 00:50:22] and what's the most effective one based on what they're doing. Try to give advice about that. But really just word of mouth that it's out there and you don't have to start from scratch. Even if you don't like everything in it or it doesn't really hit your niche of either your discipline topics or how your approach to teaching, but maybe it's somewhere to start or something to build on. It does not have to be the one resource in your class. We're hoping that it could just be supplemental. Even if it's just something that people use informally for informal learning, I think it could be effective as well. Rowena Bermio: It's so beautiful, that idea of it being an OER and adaptive in that way. Each of us are already adapting it in different ways in our courses. Kind of using bits and pieces, as Vera said, with peer reviewed articles in an upper division class or what have you. That's the amazing thing about OER. Una Daly: Yeah. And of course my focus tends to be the community colleges, it's that directly that requirement. And I know we're working with an ethnic studies faculty member in our OFA program for this coming year. I know someone signed up who is from ethnic studies, so I'll be sure to share this with them. Yeah, we'll think about other ways to increase that word of mouth with others. Alan Levine: And hopefully people who adopt, I think Vera and I were talking about this, they may adopt and use it and you might never know about it, which is fine, they don't have to. But I'm sure it means a lot when people can write back and offer things that they've learned or tried or suggestions. Vera Kennedy: We've also shared it on different platforms, I should have mentioned that. It is available in Merlot, it's searchable there and in OER Commons. We did try to put it in some of the major repositories so that it would be accessible, other than just knowing us and knowing that we released it through ECHO. We've tried to do that. And if there's any other suggestions on other repositories, we'd be happy to share it there and we don't mind other people sharing it. It's downloadable. A lot of times, I'll see people that have shared my other books and then I'll get a message from Merlot, "Somebody shared your book, we already have it." But that's okay. We know we want people to share it and distribute it as much as it is useful for them. Alan Levine: Well, I can let you know that it's crossed the border because I'm based in Canada and I've seen Our Lives on the University of Regina electronic book site. So it is spreading. Vera Kennedy: That's exciting. Thank you. Una Daly: That is exciting. I know one thing we did, and this is with a Canvas course that we put into Canvas Commons is we actually in the shared version in Canvas Commons, we put a little form in there, a little Google form, and said, "If you're using it, please let us know. We'll keep you connected and as we make changes we'll let you know and we want to hear what changes you made." It's a little harder to do that with a textbook I think. But in a course, of course it's pretty easy to plug that in. Vera Kennedy: Yeah, we should have put that on the inside cover. That'd be a good addition. Maybe on the Pressbooks because we are making some edits on there as far as formatting things. So maybe Ro, we could add that in the Pressbooks version. Rowena Bermio: Yeah, yeah. Alan Levine: All right. Well, I thank you both so much for taking the time to join us for this podcast episode and we hope to help you get the word out and get more people interested it. This is OEG Voices. It's a podcast we do here at Open Education Global. When I get around to editing this very soon, because I'm excited to edit this, there'll be an open-licensed music track from the free music archive called The Asynchrony of Life by a band called Plastic Joy. It's a licensed Creative Commons attribution non-commercial. You'll find this episode at our site voices.oeglobal.org and we hope you do some follow up discussion with Vera and Rowena in OEG Connect. And so we're always looking for more people to feature on the show. So if any of you, it's both you two and anybody listening, have a suggestion as who we should talk to, please let us know. I want to thank you again. But with that, I want to just thank you and give you a chance to say anything else before we close out the recording. Rowena Bermio: Thank you everyone for listening. I hope everyone will give Our Lives: An Ethnic Studies Primer a chance in the classroom or even just a read. Vera Kennedy: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.