My Research Focus

My research explores how we can build inclusive communities of practice that invite diverse voices into open education and challenge dominant narratives about who creates, shares, and benefits from open resources. As the Open Educational Resources (OER) Librarian at the University of Texas at Arlington, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, I use practitioner inquiry to document my journey evaluating and transforming an existing OER program.

When I arrived at UTA in October 2023, I inherited a functioning program focused on faculty adoption and large grants-one important strand of the open movement. What was missing was community. My research documents how I evaluated what was already working, then built community infrastructure on top of that sound foundation. The Open Education Trailblazers Program emerged from this work as a multi-year initiative designed to center student voice, lived experience, and invitation-centered design.

This work sits at the intersection of open educational resources (OER), critical pedagogy, and educational equity. Rather than treating OER as simply a cost-saving measure, my research examines how open practices can transform power dynamics in higher education, positioning students as co-creators and leaders rather than passive recipients.

Research Questions

Primary Question:

How can we build inclusive communities of practice that invite diverse voices into open education and challenge dominant narratives about who creates, shares, and benefits from open resources?

Supporting Questions:

  1. What narratives currently shape who feels welcome in the open movement, and how can practitioner-led programs challenge them?

  2. How does centering lived experience and personal story shift community engagement and trust?

  3. What does it mean to design for invitation rather than gatekeeping in open education work?

  4. How can microcredential programs create pathways for people traditionally excluded from educational innovation?

Theoretical Framework

My research draws on three interconnected theoretical traditions that together explain why centering lived experience matters, how invitation-centered design works, and what makes this work sustainable:

Critical Pedagogy

(Freire, hooks)

Critical pedagogy asks who has power in educational spaces and who is missing. Paulo Freire's concept of education as liberation and bell hooks' emphasis on engaged pedagogy and vulnerability inform how I approach open education, not as a technical fix, but as an opportunity to challenge who gets to be a knowledge creator.

Communities of Practice

(Wenger)

Etienne Wenger's framework helps explain how people move from the periphery to the center of communities. The badge program's user-centered design provides multiple entry points operationalizes what Wenger calls "legitimate peripheral participation", creating pathways for people to join the open education movement at whatever level feels right for them.

Care Ethics

(Noddings, Tronto)

Nel Noddings and Joan Tronto frame care as political practice, not just individual virtue. This lens helps me examine the labor of open education work, the importance of institutional support, and the need to care for oneself in order to sustain caring for others. Care ethics pushes me to ask: Who is doing this work? Under what conditions? And is it sustainable?

Methodology

This research uses critical practitioner case study with autoethnographic elements, combining:

Autoethnography: My lived experience as a first-generation college graduate who relied on financial aid, faced textbook affordability barriers, and later became an OER practitioner shapes how I understand and design for equity.

Case Study: Systematic documentation of my journey as OER Librarian from October 2023 through June 2026, including evaluation of the existing program, strategic decisions about what to build on top of it, program artifacts, pivot moments, and stakeholder feedback.

Mixed Methods: Personal narrative, program documentation, and anonymous survey data (Spring 2026) to triangulate findings.

This approach is transparent about my dual role as both program designer and researcher. Rather than treating practitioner positionality as bias to control, I position it as a lens that reveals patterns external researchers might miss.

Current Research

I am currently completing my capstone project for my participation in the THECB OER Fellowship, which has three interconnected deliverables:

1. Canvas Course: Open Education Trailblazers Badge Program

A self-paced, modular course aligned with the OERTX curriculum and integrating ACRL Framework and NACE competencies. The course supports three badge levels and will be shared openly via Canvas Commons for adaptation by other institutions and community organizations.

2. Pressbooks Book

An openly licensed book for a general audience exploring the research and theoretical perspectives on open education. Drawing on the same research as the academic paper, this book translates critical pedagogy, communities of practice, and care ethics into accessible language for readers interested in how education can be more just and inclusive.

3. Academic Paper

A case study for publication examining how narrative, community, and invitation can expand who participates in open education. Working title: "Widening the Circle: Building Community and Changing Narratives in Open Education."

Key Findings (In Progress)

Early analysis suggests several important patterns:

Inheriting vs. creating matters. Coming into an existing program required different skills than building from scratch: evaluating what was working, identifying gaps (community, student voice), and designing complementary rather than replacement structures.

From faculty-centered to community-centered is possible. A program focused on faculty adoption and grants can evolve to include students, staff, and cross-campus partnerships without abandoning its original strengths.

Personal narrative functions as a bridge. Sharing my own story of textbook struggles and "accidental" OER adoption builds trust and helps students and faculty see themselves in the work.

Student facilitators change the dynamic. When graduate student assistants lead workshops and co-design programming, peer-to-peer learning creates authenticity and relatability that librarian-led sessions alone cannot achieve.

Invitation requires infrastructure. Creating pathways from awareness to participation to leadership demands intentional design, not just good intentions. The user-centered badge program provides legitimate entry points at multiple levels of engagement.

Care work needs recognition. OER coordination is labor-intensive relational work that requires time, resources, and institutional support to be sustainable.

Why This Matters

The open education movement has successfully proven that affordability matters. Now we need to understand how to build sustainable, equitable movements that center the voices of those most affected by educational barriers.

My research contributes a replicable model for invitation-centered OER programs, demonstrates how practitioner autoethnography can illuminate institutional change, and connects open education to broader conversations about racial justice, economic equity, and disability justice in higher education.

This work is grounded in a fundamental question:

Who gets to learn, and who decides what learning looks like?

References

Core Theoretical Works

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Harvard University Press.

Giroux, H. A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. Continuum.

Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. Routledge.

Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love's labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. Routledge.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed.). University of California Press.

Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. University of Chicago Press.

Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.

Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R. A., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press.

Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses. https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

OER Research and Open Pedagogy

Carranza Ko, P., & Shochet, M. (2024). Exploring open education pedagogy in research methods classrooms: Diversifying methods. Journal of Political Science Education, 20(3), 397–412. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2022.2146197

Colvard, N. B., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(2), 262–276. https://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/

DeRosa, R., & Robison, S. (2017). From OER to open pedagogy: Harnessing the power of open. In R. S. Jhangiani & R. Biswas-Diener (Eds.), Open: The philosophy and practices that are revolutionizing education and science (pp. 115–124). Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.i

Goode, T. (2025). The architecture of learning: Space, time, and pedagogy in the open space school [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Michigan.

Kelly, R., Avila, M., & Schell, J. (2025). Students as co-authors: Achievement emotions, beliefs about writing, and OER publishing decisions. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 26(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v26i1.7321

Madhav, R. (2024). Optimising open educational resources and practices to enable inclusive education. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 39(2), 159–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2022.2089399

Seaman, J. E., & Seaman, J. (2025). Deeply digital: Educational resources in U.S. higher education, 2025. Bay View Analytics. https://www.bayviewanalytics.com/reports/deeply-digital-2025.pdf

Stevens, K. (2025). Teachers and teaching: Pedagogy, digital skills and professional development [Editorial]. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 40(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2025.2450000

Tlili, A., Huang, R., Shehata, B., Liu, D., Zhao, J., Metwally, A. H. S., Wang, H., Denden, M., Bozkurt, A., Lee, L., Beyoglu-Onsum, S., Altinay, F., Sharma, R. C., Altinay, Z., Li, Z., Liu, J., Ahmad, F., Hu, Y., Salha, S., ... Burgos, D. (2025). Uncovering the black box effect of open educational resources (OER) and practices (OEP): A meta-analysis and meta-synthesis from the perspective of activity theory. Educational Technology Research and Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-024-10445-3

Utilizing open educational practices to support sustainable higher education in the United Arab Emirates. (2024). Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 39(3), 245–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2023.2167890

Texas OER Landscape Reports

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (2019). OER in Texas higher education: Landscape report. https://www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/PDF/12345.PDF

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (2021). Advancing an ecosystem for open educational resources (OER) in Texas higher education: Biennial report. https://www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/PDF/12678.PDF

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (2022). A scan of open educational resources (OER) materials in high-impact higher education courses in Texas. https://www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/PDF/13456.PDF

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (2022). Texas open educational resources (OER) regional needs analysis. https://www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/PDF/13789.PDF

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (2024). From affordability to strategic success: The progression of OER in Texas higher education: Biennial report. https://www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/PDF/15234.PDF

Additional Research on OER, Pedagogy, and Equity

Contu, A., & Willmott, H. (2003). Re-embedding situatedness: The importance of power relations in learning theory. Organization Science, 14(3), 283–296. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.14.3.283.15167

Roberts, J. (2006). Limits to communities of practice. Journal of Management Studies, 43(3), 623–639. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00618.x

Note: For updates on research progress and emerging findings, please visit my blog.