Brook Danielle Lillehaugen
March 12, 2021
An important meeting
This month a team of 15 individuals involved in the creation of Caseidyneën Saën presented a paper entitled “Caseidyneën Saën: The collaborative creation of open educational materials as a pedagogical practice and act of resistance” at the International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation. Normally held in Hawai’i, this year the conference was online, which allows us to share the recording of our talk with a larger audience.
Overview of Caseidyneën Saën
Caseidyneën Saën is a set of open educational resources on Colonial Zapotec funded by an ACLS grant and created by a team including activists, educators, academics, and students (as described in Lillehaugen/January 2020 and Flores-Marical/February 2020). Zapotec languages (Otomanguean) are indigenous to Oaxaca and are also spoken in diaspora communities, including in the greater Los Angeles area (see e.g. J. Lopez/Nov 2020 and Velasco Vasquez/February 2021). Historical forms of Zapotec are found written in an expansive corpus written during the Mexican Colonial period. The online, digital resource Ticha (https://ticha.haverford.edu) makes these manuscripts accessible to the public by providing open access to high-resolution images, transcriptions, translations, linguistic analysis, and historical context. The continued development of Ticha is embedded in community centered pedagogical practices and committed to co-creation with Zapotec individuals and pueblos. In Caseidyneën Saën, a collection of public-facing teaching materials, we use the resources available on Ticha to teach about Zapotec language, culture, and intellectual history.
Our presentation
In this talk we interrogated the relationships needed to develop interdisciplinary work with impact and reach beyond the academy. We demonstrated how projects like ours can serve pedagogical purposes while at the same time providing intentional resistance work. For example, our project facilitated community-building among language activists from different Zapotec-speaking communities, especially through workshops created to ensure that these teaching materials are accessible to and reflect the lived reality of Zapotec community members. Originally planned to be in person, these workshops shifted online due to COVID (see Lopez/July 2020 and García Guzmán/15 August 2020); feedback from these workshops were critical in the revision of each chapter.
Interdisciplinary work is naturally a learning environment for all involved and can serve an explicit pedagogical role. For example, undergraduate student collaborators on the project attest to the development of skills in linguistics, translation, curriculum development, and multilingual collaboration while witnessing and participating in work that centers Zapotec knowledge and authority, something they had not previously seen in higher education. Watch the talk below!
Announcements
We’re thrilled to announce that our 2020 blog series was awarded Best DH Blog Post or Series of Posts by the 2020 DH Awards! Thanks you for support!
Resources and references
Ticha: advancing community-engaged digital scholarship Blog Series. This is the eleventh in a series of blog posts by participants in the 2019 ACLS Digital Extension Grant project “Ticha: advancing community-engaged digital scholarship” (PI Lillehaugen). It was originally published on the Global SL Blog with Campus Compact at https://compact.org/news/the-collaborative-creation-of-open-educational-materials-as-a-pedagogical-practice-and-act-of-resistance. The entire series of 14 posts, published between February 2020 and September 2021 are republished on Ticha’s blog and linked below:
Post 1: Long awaited beginnings, Lillehaugen
Post 2: Indigenous Voices in Pedagogical Materials: Zapotec Number Systems and Indigenous Epistemologies, Flores-Marcial
Post 3: Undergraduate Uncertainties: Joining Ticha and Rethinking Plans, Kawan-Hemler
Post 4 (Zapotec ver.): Ryien xtenën ra ni nanën steiby quën ra dizh ni mnity, F. Lopez
Post 4: Recovering knowledge through forgotten words, F. Lopez
Post 5: Social Media and Zapotec Language, Kadlecek
Post 6: 2020 Conversatorios on Colonial Zapotec, Guzmán
Post 7: Increasing Access to Knowledge through TEI encoding, Park
Post 8: Lowering Barriers to Access by Raising Understanding, Zarafonetis
Post 9: OaxaCalifornia Virtual Life: Reproducing Zapotec Culture and Language, J. Lopez
Post 10: Building a Virtual Zapotec Community: A Perspective from Koreatown, Los Angeles, Vasquez
Post 11: The Collaborative Creation of Open Educational Materials as a Pedagogical Practice and Act of Resistance, Lillehaugen
Post 12: Lessons from Caseiyneën Saën: Creativity, Resilience, and Collaborative Scholarship, Plumb
Post 13: Estudiantes Indígenas, Multilingües y Virtuales, Molina
Post 14: Rethinking Accessibility through a Summer Internship in Computational Linguistics, Gihlstorf
Credits and contributors
Published: March 12, 2021
Author: Brook Danielle Lillehaugen
Reformatted by: Dahlia Le Tourneau
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, the Ticha team and I can be reached at tichaproject@gmail.com.