What's Yours is Mine, and What's Mine is Mine Too

This blog post has been percolating for the past few weeks and is inspired by a post on a listserv where someone in faculty development was asking about common practices to cite resources from other teaching and learning centers (CTL) if that information was in turn used for another CTL as a resource or part of a presentation. The conversation that ensued was rather brief for such a great (and on the surface obvious, but not so obvious) question. A lot of the people who responded were people who have been in the field for a while and they generously used the word "steal" when it came to what they felt could happen with materials shared on CTL websites or as part of webinars or presentations. Feel free to steal they said, sometimes they said it would be nice to cited, but by and large they were not really pressing that issue. Someone said well citing things is great, but also realize we have updated work and I hate that my name is still attached to something I did a decade ago that is still floating around the internet. Fair enough.

I was of course shocked because as someone who tries to live by her ethics each day, the idea of citational justice is incredibly important to me. But of course I was thinking about who was saying it was okay to "steal." People who have done this for a while; people where that "stealing" as no real impact on them; people who were by and large straight and white with full time high level administration or faculty or staff roles. This also got me thinking about open educational resources, where licenses exist exactly so that folk can feel comfortable remixing information but often folk will use a CC-BY license which asks folk who are sharing or remixing to acknowledge the original source.

This however had me thinking about who the original source is. Because for a lot of CTLs that original source is a person-less actual centre, not the people who make up the centre, not the individual human who created the resource, not the individual human who may have a lot of expertise in the area of the resource. Who is CC-BY'd is the centre, not the faculty developer. In fact there are very few centres that are good at actually acknowledging who has individually created the resources. The University of Calgary Taylor Institute is one place that is great at acknowledging the human behind the resource. But of course if you think deeper as to why, it is because folk are faculty there not staff. Faculty developers who are considered staff are okay to be considered Borg-like in their work, they have no names, they are 7 of 9, or more like 1 of 4. But this is a whole other pathway to this blog that I don't necessarily want to go down.

What I do want to go down is what is lost when the resource is presented as representative of the centre itself and not a human in the centre. What happens in those instances is that it becomes a lot easier to think of faculty developers as generalists when that may not be the case. Some folk were hired by their institution for the particular skill set and knowledge area that they can bring to the centre. Not everyone is a generalist, nor does everyone want to be a generalist. But in a time of austerity, it benefits higher education institutions to have more generalists than specialists because they are cogs that are easier to replace and swap. They are people who are easier to disappear when budget lines tighten, when people stop caring about EDI.

But even without the names attached, those of us who have done this work for a while can go to a centre website, read a thing and know who wrote it. Like I can tell a Trevor resource, I can tell when it was Amanda who wrote a thing, I know what a Dianne slide deck looks like, I can hear Jessie's voice in the curricular discourse. So even without the names, if you know, you know. But some centres are now even hiding names of folk who work there. I can't count how many times I have had to go digging to see if some place has a person who specializes in something, to be met with a general email, or a institutional log-in only to get that information. 

This is also another kind of invisibilizing work, and it is invisibilizing work that makes another thing that is fairly common in higher education institutions possible. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a higher education institution must be in want of a person from somewhere else to come give a talk or support a particular kind of work that is already the area of specialty of one or many people in that institution. HigherEd does an excellent job of ignoring the skill and talent they already have. And they do this by scrubbing names, they do this by Swiss-army knifing the whole centre. It is also made possible by folk who have been in the game for a while saying "sure steal this" and not realizing citational justice is such an important thing for early-career folk. 

A few months ago I helped an institution by reviewing marketing for a webinar they were giving to make sure it was accessible. I did this because these were friends asking and honestly the work it took me to look over the two documents they sent was like maybe an hour or two one evening. Time that most people would have spent just flipping through Instagram. I didn't ask for acknowledgement, and didn't expect it. I was doing a favour for friends in disability community. They didn't have to say my name at the beginning of the talk, but they did. They didn't have to cite me in the promo stuff they sent out before and after. But they did. And that also does a certain kind of work. It tells people, hey this person here, they know about this accessibility stuff and maybe you should ask them questions if you have them (but also respect their time and knowledge). It also creates a level of accountability in that if the stuff I did was wrong, there was a direct path back to me to say, hey you said you knew about this stuff, but this is actually done incorrectly. 

Invisibilizing folk's names from the resources they created also invisibilizes accountability. So it makes it a lot easier for folk to go around saying they are a specialist in such and such when in fact it may be not true at all. For all the talk about how ChatGPT is going to paper over the way folk write stylistically, no one is really talking about how we have been doing this in teaching and learning space for years. It is how a group of people where many say they know and care about accessibility could send out a really badly inaccessible PDF this week. It is how people end up paying consultants for doing accessibility work that folk in their institution care and know about and could easily be a part of.

So for all the talk about how generative AI is taking intellectual property to feed the never ending appetite for big data in HigherEd, why are we not holding our own area of faculty development to the same standard? I mean I will still always know when I come across a JJ resource, but I know this because JJ is someone who cares about that citational justice, because I also have done and continue to do my homework. Because being part of community matters to me. Because I am not interested in clandestine taking. Because I know my worth and value and specialization and what I could be helpful in supporting, and I also know my limits and when to suggest other folk who could be better able to support a thing, even when others may not.