My colleague and I are curating an exhibition on socially engaging arts about homelessness. We came up with the topic because New York City politics and its system work to create a homeless population. The show’s website will be divided into three categories and will become an open education source to teach this topic after the show. Past week, I wrote most of the artist entries. At our seminar, I would like to inquire my cohort of fellows what resources might be helpful that will compose the artist page.

For my OER project, I will be modifying my ART 2400 (Global Contemporary Art) syllabus. It is now a combination of a textbook and supplementary sources from Internet-based resources. It covers various contemporary artists. I hope to re-structure the current syllabus by incorporating critical theories and community-based practice. I am not sure if the combination of theory and practice can work for undergraduate students. But certainly, our students are sensitive to critical issues. My second project is to create a platform to teach the problems related to housing insecurity in art as an OER source with my work-study students.

I used to think the Open Education Resources were publicly available education resources. However, after attending the first seminar, I learned it is far more than that. It can mean academic freedom in teaching, the materials that can be modified to be more suitable for your class, or creating meaningful content. Since the 1970s, a new generation of scholars and activists critiqued institutionalized knowledge. I believe OER presents great possibilities to teach art history critically by questioning why artists from specific races and gender are excluded from mainstream art history or create new knowledge with students by researching artists from diverse background.