This interactive workshop will generate a conversation about the complex relationship between care, equity, and justice in education, and will result in open stories as case studies. The workshop will build on the insights captured in the Equity/Care matrix which was first created by Bali & Zamora and shared in their OpenEd20 keynote. The Equity/Care matrix was originally inspired by an open crowdsourced Twitter thread interrogating “What is equity without care? And what is care without equity?” (Bali, 2020). The matrix for more complex thinking about the challenges of caring work when there is a lack of equitable policies, or the limits of equity when there is an absence of care, is developed further in Bali & Zamora (forthcoming, Italian Journal of Educational Technology, “Special Issue: A Pedagogy of Care: Critical Humanizing Approaches to Teaching and Learning with Technology”).

Participants will learn about the origins of the Equity/Care matrix, briefly examine the different theoretical quadrants, and explore the implications of the convergence/divergence of care and equity in education. Participants will then be asked to consider these implications in light of their own lived experience. They will work in pairs in breakout rooms using the Liberating Structure known as “Appreciative Interviews” which involves three steps.

First, in breakout rooms, workshop partners will interview each other (10 minutes each), taking notes as they listen to an anecdote, incident or story within the realm of open education. These accounts can emerge from one of the following prompts:

Where have you seen both systemic equity and embodied care taking place in a particular setting or situation?
Where have you seen systemic equity work well to make up for lack of embodied care taking place in a setting or situation?
Where have you seen embodied care succeed in making up for lack of systemic equity taking place in a particular setting or situation?

Second, in breakout rooms, workshop partners will discuss for 10 more minutes the common threads we can abstract across their stories. These common threads and synthetic observations will be typed up in a shared online space such as Google Jamboard.

Finally, back in the main room, all participants will be asked to share some key themes that came out from their pair work.

With participants’ permission and with attribution, the resulting output of this workshop will be used to further the ongoing research on equity and care, and will result in further refinement of the Equity/Care matrix. This iteration of our Equity/Care analysis will also result in specific recommendations for the open education community.