An exploration of agency in the localisation of open educational resources for teacher development

ABSTRACT

This study examines the practice of adaptation and translation (localisation) of Open Educational Resources (OER). It employs a sociocultural perspective to focus on the experiences of practitioners (localisers) who undertook the localisation of a suite of 125 OER created as part of a teacher professional development programme in India. This localisation process generated eight unique versions of the OER in five languages. Drawing on project reports, practitioner interviews and analysis of the adapted OER, the study explores how localisers created meaning for the task, the situational and linguistic factors that influenced and mediated their decisions to adapt the materials – or not – and the skills and experiences that emerged through the process. Although the findings revealed that changes to the materials were limited, suggesting that enacting localisation is more difficult than perhaps suggested by OER proponents, the analysis indicated forms of localisers’ emerging professional agency through this endeavour.

KEYWORDS:

• Open educational resources (OER)
• localisation
• India
• professional agency

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Teresa Connolly for her assistance with this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Freda Wolfenden is Professor of Education and International Development at the Open University, UK. Freda’s expertise is in teacher education, pedagogy and technology enabled professional learning. She deploys this to shape the design and delivery of sustainable system change in teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Lina Adinolfi is a lecturer in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. Her professional and research specialisms embrace language education and language in education, with a focus on teacher development and the role of language-supportive pedagogy, such as translanguaging, in multilingual, low-resource contexts.

Notes

1 Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (www.tessafrica.net)

2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

3 Blocks are administrative sub-district areas in rural India and comprise several village clusters.

4 State textbooks are translated from National Council of Education, Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks.

5 DTP is Desktop publishing services, required because few localisers were fluent in typing in different language scripts.

Additional information

Funding

Initially funded by UKAid, TESS-India is a multiple stakeholder partnership led by the Open University UK, working with the Government of India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the Department of Education in each participating state.