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This project grew out of a sabbatical in fall 2017 when I was a professor of English and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)^[1] at San Diego City College. My sabbatical project was to research Open Educational Resources (OER) and curate a repository of texts that could be used to support our English and ESOL courses. I also surveyed and interviewed ESOL faculty to determine critical instructional and professional development needs as we prepared for the launch of our new ELAC program i 2018 (made up of ten new courses).

As part of the sabbatical, I attended the 2017 Open Education Conference in Anaheim, California. One of the presentations was particularly impactful, “Creating an Open Anthology: A Year in the Life of an OER Grant Project.” In this presentation, Professor Julie Ann Ward of the University of Oklahoma shared an OER project that incorporated Open Pedagogy. Simply defined, Open Pedagogy is co-creating/co-teaching with students. In the OER world, this means that students are actively involved in selecting, adapting, or creating open-source texts or materials. Prior to attending the conference, I had never heard of Open Pedagogy, but I was intrigued. Using OERs creates a more equitable classroom because it keeps costs down for students. However, the idea of opening up the classroom and the teaching/learning process would have an even greater potential for creating equity and social justice in the learning environment.

In the presentation I attended, Dr. Ward described how she and her undergraduate students collaborated to publish an OER anthology of Spanish literature, Antología abierta de literatura hispana. In groups, students developed chapters for the text. Each chapter centered around a public-domain essay, story, speech, or poem from the Hispanic literary canon (15th through the 20th centuries). Students wrote author biographies, developed exercises and discussion questions, and contributed to a glossary. This critical edition was designed to be a free textbook option for students taking an introductory course in Spanish literature and culture.

When I began to plan my intermediate ESL course for spring 2018, I wanted to imagine a project that could be similar to the Antología. At first, this seemed to be quite a daunting task. The class was at the intermediate level–many of the students had just exited a high beginning course. For others, this would be their first community college course ever. Collaborating on a class book seemed like a big ask. A second challenge was content. What precisely would they write about? What would make sense as an anthology or reader? What could be published and shared with others? Eventually, Ward’s use of public domain texts led me to think about other writing in the public domain. Folktales and fables came to mind. If students wrote a folktale or story from their family or culture, they would not be entering into copyright territory. Quickly, I identified a reader for the class, World Folktales, by Kathy Burke, which had been published by Pearson Education as part of their graded reader series for learners of English. World Folktales became our mentor text, and the project was born.

Although the ultimate goal was to create an OER reader to publish for use in other ESL classes, we had a more immediate objective: presenting their stories at the San Diego City College Block Party. The Block Party is a college-wide event to showcase student projects and research. Less than a month before the Block Party, the students in my class had not yet drafted their own folktales. I panicked and was on the verge of scrapping the project, when a colleague (and Block Party organizer), Jennifer Boots, affirmed that we absolutely could accomplish the project in a few weeks. She helped me map out a calendar, and by party-time, we had completed the book, which included copyright-free images and author bios. Not all students had time to draft discussion questions or other exercises, but they all had completed multiple drafts of their story. We published a few printed copies of the book to bring to the Block Party. Students signed up for shifts to staff a table at the event. They explained the project to the college community and shared stories from the book. It was such a great experience that I repeated the project in the same class the following semester.

Unfortunately, seeing the project through to publication in an OER repository kept getting delayed. Carving out sufficient time to edit the stories, develop exercises, and design the finished product was out of reach for many years. (Frankly, I thought it would never happen.) Though I felt confident that the project had been valuable to students even without publishing the reader as an OER text, it still gnawed at me. It remained an unrealized part of the project until a class on curriculum theory at Murray State University in spring 2022 with Dr. Betsy Allen offered the opportunity to submit the text as part of the final project fi\or the course.

This OER text, The Folktale Project: A Reader for Intermediate Learner of English, owes its existence to the students in ESOL 20 and ELAC 25 in 2018 as to Dr. Betsy Allen and my fellow cohort in English 907 in 2022. The reader incorporates eight stories written by intermediate ESOL/ELAC students as well as exercises I developed as part of the final project for my curriculum course. It is both a student text and an invitation to publish an anthology or reader in your own classes. Following this Instructor’s Note are a series of lessons which, together, constitute an “instructor’s guide” for conducting a similar project with your students. The guide includes the following lessons:

• • Lesson 1: Stories as a Reflection on Culture
  • Lesson 2: The Reading Journal
  • Lesson 3: Plot Structure and Writing a Summary/Response Essay
  • Lesson 4: Write Your Own Folktale or Family Story (The Writing Process)
  • Extension Activities

I strongly encourage you to find a way to publish and present the students’ stories publicly. Having an authentic audience made the project much more engaging and meaningful.