Care ethics was championed by feminist scholars dissatisfied with theories of ethical action that relied solely on objectivity and rationality. They observed a void in moral philosophy that omitted relationships, reciprocity, context, and responsiveness. In a similar vein, the presenters came to ask: How can we center, communicate, and realize an ethic of care in our open education (OE) work? For Tronto and Fisher, care encompasses “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1993, p. 103). Here, care resonates with OE commitments to repair access and encourage cooperative relationships to ensure education as a basic human right.

Inspired by Tronto and Fisher’s model of care that articulates phases of caring and attention to the cared-for throughout, we established a care-based framework to guide our OE work. We intend the framework to support our own OE efforts at an American university by defining the values we wish to center, and realize as ways of being and outcomes. We hope the framework will help us convey these values in our OE communications and collaborations with students and colleagues.

We shared a first version of our framework at OE Global 2020, where we engaged colleagues in actively reflecting on connections between the framework and their own values and work in OE. We have extended this work to create a framework iteration focused on educator care for the risk and vulnerability diverse students experience working in open, and in educational landscapes complicated by surveillance technologies and student data ownership issues. We expand this framework iteration with question prompts to support educator use of the framework for self-reflective engagement with care for students when designing and implementing learning experiences involving open educational resources and open pedagogies (OP).

We will present our process developing this framework, surveying the local context, people, and works that inspired and informed this work. These include writing by Cronin (2020), Fisher and Tronto (1990), Noddings (1984), and Tronto (1993), and frameworks created by others for OE, OP, and the values-driven design of higher education learning. Participants will have the opportunity to respond to our framework, consider the relevance of a care framework for their local work and context, and reflect on their own enactments of care in open education. We will use Answergarden, participant annotation of our framework, a shared document for collective note taking, and openly-licensed slides to facilitate dialogue during and beyond the session. Educators, librarians, administrators, and others directly engaged in higher education open education initiatives may find this session especially relevant to their work.