Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2023

Publication Title

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology

Volume

9

Abstract

A racially diverse sample of Introductory Psychology students (n = 32) completed a semester-long open pedagogy assignment focused on improving diversity depicted in photographs in psychology textbooks. Students first did a content analysis on racial and gender diversity within a popular openly licensed Introductory Psychology textbook (i.e., an open educational resource [OER]) and found that White presenting men were overrepresented. Then, for each broad topic in the course, students shared a topic-relevant photograph they had taken with the purpose of improving the diversity of textbook content. Students assigned these photographs Creative Commons (CC) license. Because the openly licensed textbook also had a Creative Commons license, the photographs could be used to edit the textbook. The final project included posting two photographs on a public Flickr account with a CC license. Seventy-five percent of students indicated a medium- to high-level understanding of the goal of the project being to increase diversity in the photographs available for OER textbooks. Overall, students rated the project as an engaging and positive experience with high levels of educational value. Moreover, students generally agreed that their contributions added to the diversity of publicly available materials. The most common concern about the project was that photographs would be openly available to the world at large. Students who indicated higher levels of concern with openness were also less likely to want to do a similar project in another course.

Issue

4

First Page

405

Last Page

418

DOI

10.1037/stl0000385

ISSN

2332-211X

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