USF Libraries is excited to share that a new Open Educational Resource is launching this fall! The EcoLiteracies for Climate Action in Florida (ELCAF) portal is part of a larger collaborative effort between faculty in the USF Libraries, the College of Education, and the College of Education. The OER design has been led by Dr. Alexandra Panos in Literacy Studies and Dr. Amanda Boczar in USF Libraries’ Special Collections to pair environmentally-focused stories with archival materials from USF Libraries’ Florida Environment and Natural History collections. ELCAF is designed to help teachers, community educators, teacher educators, and students draw connections between fiction and non-fiction stories, events in history, and acts of climate-focused citizenship.
Theoretically focused in ecojustice and feminist digital pedagogy approaches to engaging in conversations about climate action and environmentalism, the OER will allow educators and learners to engage with the content from a variety of angles and use what works best in their teaching contexts. Through the pairing of archival documents with contemporary media resources, readers will have the opportunity to anchor their world in the past and uncover many new voices. Each story covered in the portal is also matched with optional “stances,” or analytic approaches, to rethink the narratives and place them into context.
ELCAF originated as a collaboration for library instruction support with Research and Instruction Librarian Susan Ariew, who has developed a resource LibGuide for Dr. Panos’ Ecojustice Literacies course in Fall 2022. ELCAF has received generous support from the USF Center for Innovation and Learning, the College of Education, USF Libraries, and an American Library Association Carnegie-Whitney Grant.