An Institute-Based Approach to OER in Digital Caribbean Studies

Abstract

In May 2019, more than forty educators, scholars, and librarians came together for a week-long workshop to collaboratively explore the potential—and the limitations—of digital pedagogies within Caribbean Studies. Hosted by the University of Florida (UF) and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), “Migration, Mobility, Sustainability: Caribbean Studies & Digital Humanities” delved into digital projects amplifying community narratives across the Caribbean diaspora, low-barrier tools to enable student-instructor co-creation, and efforts to subvert colonialist legacies as we build and describe digital collections. This face-to-face experience offered a rich starting point for a two-year institute that fostered virtual dialogue, course development, and publication of a contextualized selection of open educational resources (OER). With a multi-institutional, international group of participants working across the Caribbean and the United States, institute leaders took a flexible approach to topical coverage, schedule, and anticipated outcomes that invited individual perspectives and experience to shape the conversation. This approach drove the capacious framing of OER, continued in this chapter, simply as content available freely online and useful to teachers and students. Rather than attempting to normalize vocabulary or prescriptively define what might “count” as an OER, the institute broadly encouraged knowledge-sharing around access to digital collections, technology, and models for leveraging both in the classroom. Presentations on courses and projects served as boundary objects, offering common ground where participants could explore potential next steps and opportunities for collaboration from multiple vantage points. This chapter focuses on the institute as a case study for OER development that centers relationship-building, lived experience, empathy, and flexibility as foundational principles, grounded in feminist approaches to digital pedagogy. Attention to social justice permeates this work, both in amplifying Caribbean voices across the diaspora and in leveraging approaches in the digital humanities (DH) that call on students to challenge reductive or colonialist perspectives. These values mirror those embodied by participants’ own research and teaching, and the following sections draw heavily on the publicly available reflections, syllabi, assignments, and other materials they contributed.