Education Research Guide:Open Educational Resources (OER) for Education

Children, Families, Schools, and Communities is an introductory text in the field of Child and Family Studies. It provides a lens for understanding the evolving definition of “family”. It promotes strategies for culturally sustaining and deeply collaborative relationships. Children, Families, Schools, and Communities is an adapted OER text from Rebecca Laff’s and Wendy Ruiz’s "Child, Family, and Community".

"The Early Literacy Journey: Supporting and Celebrating Young Learners" provides an overview of language and literacy development in the early years, from birth through preschool. It examines the critical role that these years play in the emergence of literacy. All aspects of this area of development, reading, writing, speaking, and listening are explored and considered. This text was adapted from an OER text, "Early Childhood Literacy: Engaging and Empowering Emergent Readers and Writers, Birth-Age 5," written by Schull, C., La Croix, L., Miller, S., Austin, K., Kidd, J.

This is the second entry in the Humanizing Science through STEM and the Arts (STEAM) interdisciplinary project. For this series, we collaborated with a cohort of future teachers in a science methods class who were majoring in Early Childhood Education. The future teachers authored stories for children inspired by Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and then read them aloud as part of a giving-back, service-learning activity.

Theories, teaching strategies, and instructional materials pertinent to teaching reading and writing in grades PK-3, with an emphasis on integrating reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as integration across content areas while addressing diversity and inclusion.

Co-created with students at Iowa State University in the course EDUC 395: Teaching Disciplinary Literacy and supported by CDL experts, this textbook offers accessible, research-based, multidisciplinary CDL strategies ready for implementation in secondary classrooms.

The Whole Child is a textbook for Child Psychology or Child Growth and Development that is both comprehensive and concise. Students do not need a lengthy volume to digest, but they do need a strong understanding of how a young child develops. Only with this understanding can developmentally appropriate practice emerge in the classroom and in other places that are loving and caring spaces for young children. With the rising cost of textbooks, this textbook is a resource for instructors looking to find quality, accessible materials for our students.

Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education helps students think about why they take General Education courses and what significance they have, individually and as a program as a whole. It allows students the time to contemplate connections, the potential reasons for developing certain learning outcomes and skills, and the applications to other courses as well as their professional and personal lives. General education is viewed through the lens of what John Lewis called "good, necessary trouble," expanding on how the liberal arts and sciences contribute to understanding and creating change in the world. Sections include stories, research, testimonies and reflections about student success, links to further readings, and activities.