Paper short abstract:

This paper overviews Open Educational Practices as methods to engage students not only in learning about STS but also to contribute to knowledge, engage in knowledge creation, and to diversify knowledge in these spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Open Educational Practices (OEPs), teaching students with both Open Educational Resources (OERs) as well as engaging them with open platforms, systems, and the space to create, modify, and build upon those resources, offers incredible benefits not only for teaching the topic at hand, but also learning to produce information, learn the processes, and engage in real-world information creation. Focusing on teaching with Wikipedia, this paper will examine how engaging students with Wikipedia-based assignments can engage students in various content and create project-based assignments that attend to issues of representation, bias, and social justice. These practices engage students in deep learning about informational creation processes, matching many of the frameworks provided by the Association of College Research Libraries’s (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy, illustrating not just how to access and understand knowledge, but also how decisions are made about what counts as knowledge, what gets included, and how to produce knowledge within these frameworks. These techniques work for many spaces outside of STS, but in particular, they are incredibly apt for STS as they engage students' metacognition around how to think about science and technology and how they understand themselves as researchers and participants engaged with the conversations in the field. Finally, these practices offer potentials for social justice as they both increase self efficacy for the learners, as well as offer opportunities to diversify knowledge systems.