Open education enables linguistic and cultural diversity
Today’s article is written by Glenda Cox
Associate Professor Glenda Cox works in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT: http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/) at the University of Cape Town and her portfolio includes postgraduate teaching, Curriculum change projects, Open Education, and Staff development.
She holds the UNESCO chair in Open Education and Social Justice (2021-2025) and is a member of the UNITWIN network on Open Education (2024-2028). She is also Vice president of the Board of Open Education global organisation.
She is passionate about the role of Open Education in the changing the world of Higher Education.
Open education researchers and advocates have consistently worked towards building quality education for all. This priority remains crucial and currently, the hype of AI has diverted attention from meeting students’ educational needs. It’s time to recentre on the fundamental principles and powerful affordances of open education.
Open education plays a key role in addressing social injustice. Nancy Fraser (2005) identifies three interconnected dimensions of justice: economic (distribution of resources), cultural (recognition of different identities and groups), and political (representation of participation and voice). Research in open education has focused on cost-saving and equity of access to materials. Recently, the emphasis has shifted to the multiple affordances of open education to remedy cultural and political injustices.
This blog focuses on cultural recognition through translation and localisation of open education. Cultural misrecognition is a globally pervasive form of injustice. Nancy Fraser refers to it as the devaluing of cultural values. A just response includes recognizing and valuing people’s attributes and their ways of being in, understanding, and acting upon the world.
Image by: Pietro Soldi https://thegreats.co/artists/pietro-soldi. Published under Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA).
There is evidence of the dominance of the English language in higher education globally (Doiz et al. 2013). Many students enter higher education with English as a second or third language, facing challenges in mastering the language while adapting to a new culture. One remedy is translating key concepts in existing open textbooks. With the rise of automatic translation tools and large language models, these tools can support the use of multiple languages in open education, Open Science (UNESCO 2021), and Open Access. However, efforts to reach the world’s more than 7000 languages remain a distant dream (Bowker, 2024). Meta AI’s project No Language Left Behind aims to support 200 languages (Costa-Jussà et al. 2022). English remains the target language, placing the responsibility for translation on non-Anglophone scholars, while English-speaking scholars remain privileged (Bowker, 2024).
In addition to translating materials, it is fundamental for students to have epistemological access through inclusive pedagogies and curriculum change. Epistemological access moves beyond physical or formal access to meaningful access to university resources. Faculty need to understand their student cohort’s needs, as there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Open textbook authors at the University of Cape Town describe localisation as contextualising teaching and loosening the grip of European and American perspectives. Relevance includes local case studies representing students’ lived experiences. Curriculum transformation involves updating courses and materials to reflect new forms of thought, ensuring the teaching body reflects the student body.
A conversation about curriculum transformation must include decolonisation. The decolonial discussion is prominent in many higher education institutions, especially in previously colonised countries. Hölscher, Zembylas, and Bozalek (2020) highlight two key aspects of decolonisation: resisting Eurocentrism and acknowledging the contributions of colonised populations, and righting the wrongs of colonial domination with an ethical stance towards justice for those affected by persistent forms of coloniality. Open education provides just ways to teach, select, and produce content.
Open education has not resolved the economic and socio-political challenges facing universities and learners. However, for example, open textbooks enable open educational practitioners to take steps toward transforming the curriculum. Local, relevant, and accessible content is essential for redress. Open education provides a means to showcase cultural and linguistic diversity. The goal is for students to have course materials that are translated, locally sourced, and relevant to their lived realities.
References
Bowker, L., (2024) “Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication: How Far Can Technology Take Us and What Else Can We Do?”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 27(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.6262
Costa-jussà, Marta R., James Cross, Onur Çelebi, Maha Elbayad, Kenneth Heafield, Kevin Heffernan, Elahe Kalbassi, et al. 2022. No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04672
Doiz, A., Lasagabaster, D. and Sierra, J. (2013). Globalisation, internationalisation, multilingualism and linguistic strains in higher education. Studies in Higher Education [online], 38(9), pp. 1407–1421. Available from: https://doi10.1080/03075079.2011.642349
Fraser, N. (2005) Re-framing justice in a globalising world. New Left Review 36, 69–88. Available from: https://newleftreview-org.ezproxy.uct.ac.za/issues/ii36/articles/nancy-fraser-reframing-justice-in-a-globalizing-world.
Hölscher,D., Zembylas,M., and Bozalek, V. (2020). “Neoliberalism, Coloniality and Nancy Fraser’s Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate in South African Higher Education: Concluding Thoughts,” in Nancy Fraser and Participatory Parity: Reframing Social Justice in South African Higher Education, ed. Vivienne Bozalek, Dorothee Hölscher and Michalinos Zembylas. London: Routledge.
UNESCO. 2021. Recommendation on Open Science. https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about
