About Our Teaching Materials
As educators, we prioritize critical, transformative pedagogy. We aim to recenter marginalized perspectives in teaching and engage students as creators of knowledge.
Creating innovative teaching materials is a key part of this work. We publish our materials as open educational resources (OERs), so they’re permanently free to access and share. In addition, other educators and students can customize and modify the materials for their own teaching contexts. (Just check the terms of the Creative Commons license!)
You can browse our teaching materials library on OER Commons, an internationally-recognized platform for sharing open educational resources.
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Open educational resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any format —including books, articles, images, audio, videos, games, interactive modules, and more — that are published with an open license, typically from Creative Commons. The open license allows educators and students to freely access, create, license, (re)use, own, and modify the materials.
The open education movement aims to create alternatives to traditional educational resources, often inaccessible and unaffordable due to publisher monopolies, paywalls, and the neoliberal marketplace’s grip on the educational sector. OERs can mitigate the high cost of learning materials, which otherwise typically falls on students and educators.
Open materials and practices can be a vehicle for critical, transformative pedagogy, allowing educators to recenter marginalized perspectives and engage students as experts and knowledge creators.
At the Pedagogy Lab, we aim to create innovative OERs that add crucial voices to the conversation and enhance the current educational landscape — from K-12 to higher education to community and nontraditional settings.
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Our teaching materials library features dozens of audio shorts created by our Pedagogy Lab Summer Fellows. These are 5- to 20-minute standalone audio pieces which blend guided meditation, storytelling, oral history, lecture, and podcast. The audio shorts lead listeners through sensory experiences, introduce theories and concepts, reflect on aspects of Black, brown, queer, and disabled existence, and more.
Our expanding teaching materials library hosts open learning resources in a variety of formats. However, our Fellowship focuses on audio specifically in order to:
Challenge the privileging of the written word in academia, K-12, and dominant Western societies in general.
Increase accessibility for those who process information better in audio, reduce cognitive overload, and meet more students’ needs.
Provide a healing antidote for students and educators enduring ongoing systemic failures and harms. Shorter than a full-length podcast, audio shorts create temporal spaces that students and educators can enter together.
Enhance the content in public OER repositories used by educators worldwide. Oral/audio forms of narrative, research, and meaning-making in general, along with content from marginalized creators, are underrepresented in the OER landscape.
Cultivate a sense of play, creativity, and care in the creation and distribution of educational material.
Challenge Fellows to draw on their personal experiences and interests and succinctly address complex theories and ideas for various audiences.
Any one media format may intrinsically exclude some people, and audio is not accessible to those who are d/Deaf, hard-of-hearing, or have audio processing disorders, especially if not transcribed. We are currently working on transcribing our audio OER. As an accessibility best practice, we recommend providing learning materials in as many formats as possible.