Development of open educational resources: a sustainability model for literacy in bilingual environments

Group Submission Type: Paper Session

Proposal

Guatemala is a multi-ethnic, multicultural and plurilingual country with 24 indigenous languages, in addition to Spanish. This means that bringing quality education, with cultural and linguistic relevance, is a complex situation. While education is recognized as a public good and a right in the country, as well as its wide impact supporting a sustainable human development, there is inequity in the quality of the services provided, mainly in rural and indigenous areas. In addition, national evaluations results show that it is necessary to improve students’ reading comprehension at all education levels.

USAID Lifelong Learning (LLL) Project implements a literacy model for bilingual intercultural contexts in the western highlands of Guatemala, ranging from preprimary to third grade. The evidence-based model, founded on a transition approach of bilingualism, responds to the need to improve reading skills in the mother tongue and in a second language in bilingual contexts of Guatemala. To achieve this, students must have access to a variety of reading books, according to their level, as other quality educational materials for learning their native language and Spanish. However, students and the population in general have little access to resources in indigenous languages, since having a wide availability of reading resources in different languages poses challenges in terms of economic resources, production time and publication of these so that they are available in schools and in homes. This panel discusses the material development strategy that the LLL project has implemented since 2014, as well as the results of the use of the materials in intervention areas and at the national level.

The bilingual education approach prescribes that the student will learn to read in the first language (L1) and will transition reading skills to the second language (L2). Whereas Mayan languages are spoken by most of the school age population, some Mayan students will speak only Spanish, and many students will first come to school with some Spanish. Thus, the typical classroom is diverse in terms of students’ spoken language mastery, in a continuum from mostly monolingual Mayan speaker to monolingual Spanish speaker.
Material development seeks to address sustainability of the bilingual literacy model, support the bilingual education approach to which the literacy model responds, be inclusive by design and, reflect local culture. The expected result is to produce literacy materials for L1 and L2 that support learning, that are available and in use in classrooms. For this, the materials development strategy has used the open educational resources (OER) approach.
The first paper presents the strategy that the LLL Project uses to develop materials under the OER approach. According to this approach, the material development process must consider three steps: a) development, b) distribution and c) use. The interaction of the different elements of these steps enhances the sustainability of the educational resources contributing at the same time to the sustainability of the intervention for which they were created. Involvement of different actors at different levels (national, regional, departmental, local) is a key element. The OER approach implements an ecosystem that implies project activities such as: a) stakeholders’ involvement, b) participatory design, and c) alignment of materials with the bilingual model. In addition, distribution of materials requires an effort to institutionalize the model in the MoE, which facilitates implementation in the classroom at the same time.
The second paper describes the universal design approach used by the project to design materials. Materials development seeks to be inclusive and to expand MoE possibilities to respond to different educational needs and different audiences (students with special needs, different languages, and different users). Different types of resources have been developed including big books, flipcharts, audiobooks, textbooks and materials for the teaching and learning of bi-literacy skills in the mother tongue and in Spanish as a second language, in the early grades. The following principles of universal design were applied to these materials: equitable use, flexibility in use, simple and intuitive use, perceptible information, size and space for approach and use. A gender equity approach is also incorporated, and the usability of resources has been considered to improve them. LLL Project’s educational resources will be shown at the panel.
The third paper describes the partnership implemented with Bloom to develop reading materials that, on the one hand, respond to the model, but have also been developed using the open educational resource and universal design strategy.
The panel will culminate with the results of the monitoring of the use of the materials developed in this project. Particularly, the paper will discuss the use of the linguistic profile. This assessment material developed under the project using principles of the OER approach and a universal design has been successfully implemented in classrooms and has been adopted by the MoE to orient teachers in the appropriate language of instruction.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Global Literacy

Chair

• Fernando Ernesto Rubio, Juarez and Associates

Individual Presentations

• Open educational resources sustainability to support a literacy model in bilingual and intercultural environments - María Jose Castillo, Juarez & Associates

• Text and materials universal design - Antonio Arreaga, Juarez & Associates

• Local development of digital reading books in Guatemala - Sophia Maldonado, USAID Lifelong learning project, Juarez and Associates, Inc.

• Use of educational resources based on the literacy model: Linguistic profile in western highlands of Guatemala - Leslie Vanessa Rosales de Veliz, Juarez and Associates