1 of 24

Heather Blicher

Equity Consultant

heatherblicher@gmail.com

Designing with

Open and Equity-Minded Images

Image by Nina Robinson from Images of Empowerment, Licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0.

Open Oregon Instructional Design

Community of Practice

January 18, 2022

This presentation is by Heather Blicher and licensed CC BY 4.0.

2 of 24

Quiet Reflection:

Who are you?
How do you bring your identity into your design work?
What is the scope of change that’s possible with the constraints of your situation?

3 of 24

Equality vs Equity

Everyone gets a shirt vs everyone gets a shirt that fits.

4 of 24

What is Equality vs Equity?

Image from https://www.equitytool.org/equity /

5 of 24

“Equity is grounded in the principle of fairness. In higher education, equity refers to ensuring that each student receives what they need to be successful through the intentional design of the college experience.”

Retrieved from OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining, by Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.

6 of 24

How Does Equity Relate to Diversity and Inclusion?

7 of 24

What can we do about that?

8 of 24

9 of 24

Google Images

Type “woman yoga”
What image results do you get?

10 of 24

11 of 24

Open Access Images

https://pixabay.com/ or other
Type “woman yoga”
What image results you get?

12 of 24

13 of 24

Centered in Western Yoga	Overlooked in Western Yoga
Youth, Thinness, or Able-bodied	Older, Larger, or Disabled Bodies
White People	Black & Brown People
Fashion	Spirituality
Wealth	Non-Affluent
	Heritage and Culture
	Indigenous Knowledge

(Content adapted from Barkataki, 2020)

Most images show a lack of diversity and there’s even less when searching open images. I was surprised at this too!

Delving more into this topic, I stumbled upon implicit biases that I didn’t realize were even there, that show layers of exclusion beyond the obvious.

I was drawn to an instagram post by an author who posted about the connection between yoga and social justice.

She talks about how people on the covers of yoga magazines are “white every time.” Most of our image searches show that the images are:

Less about Yoga being accessible to people of any background, age, size, ability, or income and more about a stereotype of yoga
The author also points out that yoga is more than a workout routine and has deeper meaning than the mainstream gives it. What we see in images, show that we don’t acknowledge the heritage and culture of yoga and instead focus on it more as a fashion statement

14 of 24

Why images?

15 of 24

Why images?

Images enhance learning and retention by improving student engagement.

16 of 24

Going Beyond Free

“As important as access is to students and to institutions, it is a starting place for leveraging other benefits of OER, and I hope that our conversations about [open education] go beyond access, because saving money on materials doesn’t address bigger issues in student persistence and completion.”

(West, 2018)

17 of 24

Challenges

Lack of culturally relevant OER content
Unintentionally biased content
Need for diverse content creators
Faculty awareness

Queer Black and Disabled by Chona Kasinger from the Disabled and Here project, Licensed CC BY 4.0

18 of 24

Deck City Image by Chona Kasinger from the Disabled and Here project, Licensed CC BY 4.0

Disabled And Here is a photo and interview series celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).

19 of 24

20 of 24

AllGo Plus-Size

21 of 24

D & I Focused Image Repositories

I mages of Empowerment: Free images of women’s lives and work, created by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Getty Images; License: CC-BY-NC-4.0

Allgo Plus-Size: Free stock photography collections featuring plus-size people; License: While attribution is not required, please credit

Disabled And Here: Free stock photography featuring disabled BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), varied body sizes/types, sexual orientations, and gender identities in the Pacific Northwest; License CC BY 4.0

The Gender Spectrum Collection : Free stock photos of trans and non-binary people, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Nappy : Free high-resolution photos of black and brown people, licensed Creative Commons Zero (CC0)

PICNOI : Free photos of people of color; no attribution required, but can give credit by linking to site

#WOCinTech Chat : Free photos of women and non-binary people of color working in the Tech field; licensed CC BY #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com

Redefining Women Icon Collection : Icons of women; License: Creative Commons Public Domain CC0 1.0

(Blicher, 2020)

22 of 24

Quiet Reflection Follow-Up:

Who are you?
How do you bring your identity into your design work?
What is the scope of change that’s possible with the constraints of your situation?

Who are you?
How do you bring your identity into your design work?
What is the scope of change that’s possible with the constraints of your situation?

23 of 24

Activity:

Choose one image repository and explore it.

24 of 24

Thank you!

heatherblicher@gmail.com

Heather Blicher