International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 64

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
Collaborative leadership,
invisible labor, and OER
Attempting to advance an OER initiative
can feel overwhelming in the face
of a lengthy list of action items and responsibilities.
While challenges, such as
the lack of funding, expertise, time to
select and create materials, and the lack
of institutional buy-in, have been well
documented in the literature (Annand
& Jensen, 2017; Belikov & Bodily, 2016;
Hanley & Bonilla, 2016; McGowan,
2019; Rolfe & Fowler, 2012; Taylor &
Taylor, 2018), there is a critical need
to examine these challenges through
the lens of labor inequities in OER efforts.
While the literature addresses the
need for adequate incentives for faculty
adopting OER, such as recognition for
OER teaching and scholarship in the
promotion and tenure process (Annand
& Jensen, 2017; Doan, 2017; Taylor
& Taylor, 2018; Walz, 2015), greater
awareness and research is needed
to document the labor of individuals
working in what are often considered
“academic support roles” on campus,
such as librarians, instructional designers,
and IT staff.
The rising reliance on the labor
of adjunct faculty, graduate student,
and contract lecturers—many of whom
are on the front lines teaching the high
enrollment courses crucial to OER
adoption and success—add to the increasing
precarity of labor. Hourly wage
structures rather than salaries can certainly
complicate how or whether the
extra work required to adopt OER is
even compensated (Crissinger, 2015).
Given that the use of OER has shown
to increase student academic achievement,
the case for OER adoption is a
compelling one for libraries and academic
support centers. However, the
virtue of the OER cause should not be
weaponized against those doing the
necessary, yet largely unacknowledged
day-to-day work required to support an
OER program.
In OER, as in library work, “vocational
awe,” or an ethos of self-sacrifice
can come at a high cost of unsustainability
and burnout (Fobazi, 2018).
As Hanley and Bonilla (2016) wrote, it
is important to recognize that “behind
every free textbook lays a frequently
invisible economy of labor and resources”
(p. 139). In articles written by both
librarian and non-librarian scholars,
librarians are sometimes cast as reliable
supports that can step in and rescue
overburdened faculty by providing
time-intensive labor to make possible
the selection or development of OER
materials, without considering the existing
workloads of the librarians (Belikov
& Bodily, 2016; Crozier, 2018; Davis et
al., 2016; Goodsett, Loomis, & Miles,
2016). Libraries are sometimes designated
as the main stage for the OER
rollout, whether through an affordable
textbook program or OER initiative,
all of which require vast amounts of financial
support, training, and additions
to already-stretched library resources
(Bell & Salem, 2017; Reed & Jahre, 2019;
Salem, 2017; Smith & Lee, 2017). At
many institutions, however, the critical
support that librarians provide is completely
unrecognized. Bell (2018) found
that faculty rarely consider turning to
librarians for OER assistance. Braddlee
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