Foreword
Susan Carter
At the University of Southern Queensland [USQ], we are committed to advancing the use of open textbooks in higher education evidenced by our membership as the first Australian university in the Open Textbook Network [OTN]. This textbook is a tool to support Wiley’s five R’s of openness – retain, reuse, redistribute, revise and remix.
Enjoy the collection of chapters, including:
- Introducing the key ideas
- Differing childhoods: Transgressing boundaries through thinking differently
- Celebrating diversity: Focusing on inclusion
- Opening eyes onto diversity and inclusion in early childhood education
- Fostering first year nurses’ inclusive practice: A key building black for patient centred care
- Positioning ourselves in multicultural education: Opening our eyes to culture
- Creating an inclusive school for refugees and students with English as a second language or dialect
- Opening eyes to vision impairment: Inclusion is just another way of seeing
- Setting the scene: The importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural perspectives in education (the danger of the single story)
- Conclusion
In Australia and internationally much still needs to occur to promote inclusive practices in education and society with many educators not feeling equipped to recognise or appreciate diversity or cater effectively for inclusion (Hardy & Woodcock, 2015). It is into this space that a University of Southern Queensland team of researchers, practitioners, and academics intends to contribute an open textbook “Opening Eyes onto Inclusion and Diversity”. With embedded audio–visual components, the Open Textbook is designed to enhance the quality of the reader’s experience with each chapter posing key understandings underpinning inclusion and diversity. Readers are encouraged to answer questions on culture, special learning needs, varied educational contexts, gender diversity and more. The key expected outcome of this open textbook is to engage readers in making meaning of inclusion and diversity and applying their learning to their own individual contexts.
REFERENCES
Hardy, I. & Woodcock, S. (2015). Inclusive education policies: discourses of difference, diversity and deficit. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 19(2) ,141-164. doi:10.1080/13603116.2014.908965.
Wiley, D. (2010). Openness as catalyst for an educational reformation. EDUCAUSE Review, 45 (4), 14–20.
