In recent years, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained recognition for their potential to enhance teacher education and general educational settings, as evidenced by studies such as Röwert & Kostrzewa (2021), and institutions like BMBF (2022) and UNESCO & Commonwealth of Learning (2019). While the term "Open Educational Practices" (OEP) often refers to activities involving OER, the concept, as pointed out by Bali et al. (2018) and Bellinger & Mayrberger (2020), encompasses a range of openness approaches that extend beyond or even operate independently of OER. This includes open pedagogical-participative learning scenarios using social media tools for collaborative knowledge creation. An understudied aspect in the OEP discourse is the challenges and side effects that student engagement can have.

This paper explores the challenges of OEP in addressing diversity issues, focusing on the 'Diversity goes Digital' project at TU Darmstadt as a case study. The project was initiated in response to an increase in discriminatory discourse in media spaces (Bünger and Czejkowska, 2020), where perceived differences from the dominant society (Attia et al., 2015) trigger hostility towards democratic values that educators strive to impart. This landscape includes debates on anti-genderism, rising right-wing populism and persistent racism. A key objective of the project - appropriate to the goals of Council of the European Union (2023) - was to contribute to diversity-oriented media education in teacher training and foster media literacy within a diverse, democratic society.

A central didactic approach was to enable students of teaching at vocational schools and high schools to engage in a product- and practice-oriented examination of societal orders of difference in the school context. This approach aimed to help them learn to critically examine themselves in relation to both analog and digital processes of 'doing difference' during lesson development. Furthermore, the focus was on ensuring that these future educators would neither ignore nor stigmatize the diversity of lifestyles in school practice, which is crucial for fostering an inclusive and reflective educational environment (FRA Report 2020). Therefore, students created explainer videos on topics such as heteronormativity and racism. Choosing video creation as an approach was based on its potential to engage students in simplifying complex subjects in an engaging and accurate manner (Wolf, 2015). This exercise was intended not only to help students better understand the concepts but also to develop effective communication skills essential for educators. However, these videos, shared on YouTube, faced significant right-wing populist backlash against both the students and educators.

After introducing the project, the presentation shifts focus to analyze the right-wing populist responses encountered. The leading questions are:

• Who is authoring the observed comments, and to what extent can a digital community and infrastructure be identified behind these coordinated responses?
• What disinformation strategies are evident in the patterns of comments that aim to problematize the topics of the videos and discredit the authors and educators?

The objective of this section is to highlight the potential reactions such educational projects might face, preparing stakeholders for similar challenges. This analysis contributes to supporting the European Union's perspective (2022) on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training.

An exploratory methodology was adopted to address the leading questions. The analysis involved: (1) Examining the YouTube channel statistics of the project to contextualize the timing of comment responses. (2) Conducting a content analysis of the comments to reconstruct various patterns within them. (3) Performing an exploratory analysis of potential sources of the comments, leading to the identification of a specific video from a right-wing extremist community as the initiator of the series of comments on the students' explainer videos. This methodological approach enabled an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of digital discourse, particularly focusing on how a single influential source within the right-wing extremist community can influence the narrative and public reaction to educational content about diversity. It provided critical insights into the challenges and effects that digital media has in the realms of diversity education and public discourse.

The project, involving the creation and dissemination of educational videos on diversity, revealed the complex dynamics of public engagement with digital media in educational contexts. A significant finding was the nature of the responses to these videos, especially from right-wing extremist groups. The comments and reactions were primarily characterized by know pattens like misleading contextualization, polarization, and personal defamation. This indicated a trend of using digital platforms not just for disagreement or debate, but for spreading misinformation and creating divisiveness. Moreover examining the digital responses of right-wing populist actors provides insights into how difference is used as a political mobilization topic and how (unplannable) discursive processes on social media pose a challenge for projects in active media work and open educational practices. The paper concludes with a reflection on the possibilities and limits of Open Educational Practices and open media work in institutionalized settings, discussing how such projects can contribute to a more inclusive and diverse digital space despite confrontations with disinformation campaigns and polarizing narratives. The project underscores the need for strategies (European Commission, 2022) to effectively navigate and counteract such negative responses in digital public discourse.

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