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This is a quick post to applaud Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (I know, I know, I applaud her a lot, but she totally deserves it). Honestly, it is quite rare (more rare than you would think) that someone who writes and speaks about equity and participation actually truly embodies these ideals in their practice. The things that stand out for me in Cheryl’s work is her emphasis on social justice and parity of participation. And she just modeled it for me over the past few days.
Cheryl has been invited to give a couple of workshops on OER for the AMICAL 2019 conference (March-April) here in Cairo (yay!) and what she has done to prepare for her workshop is:
- Ask everyone applying for the workshops to fill out a quick survey so that she knows who her audience are, what kind of knowledge and experience they have regarding OER
- Invite a few key people from the institutions participating in the conference to let her know about the OER landscape in their organization, so she can tailor the workshop using their context and examples
So she met with my colleague and me yesterday for the second reason (I was helping her put together #1, giving feedback, because I’m on the program committee and helping out however I can) and we were both really impressed by the kinds of questions she asked and how she listened. She even said at the end “do you mind if I use what you’ve said…” and she said she would let us know how she’s using it, and she also said we could choose to be mentioned by name or not (which makes sense for some sensitive stuff, right?).
So yeah. Thanks Cheryl for embodying your values and practicing what you preach.
Thanks for the shout-out. As you say walking the social justice talk rather than merely advocating or researching it is a lot harder in practice! However, I really valued the generosity of spirit evident in our conversation & the passion you & Nadine expressed about openness.