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Please contribute resources, ideas, questions, visions... it's all good! You can log in, you can just include your name in your post, or post anonymously, that all works. Just click on the pink plus sign in the lower left or double click in the Padlet.
You can also like posts and comment too :-)

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Wrong Theory exercise (Thea, Heather, Steven, Maha): Agency was key

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Wrong Theory exercise (Thea, Heather, Steven, Maha): Agency was key

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Copy of wrong_theory_protocol Thea, Heather, Steven, Maha

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Jesse Stommel: The Human Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

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Jesse Stommel: The Human Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

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Interesting resources, touching at times on assessment:

Twitter thread

Link to download an OCR-enabled PDF (shared in last Tweet of thread)

Policy insights: The Digitalization of Education (more connected to critical pedagogy & digital literacy MYFest strands)

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A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of our technologies. But it begins with a consideration of what we value.

Slides from my talk today for the Council of Europe's (@coe) @CoE_EU_HF event on “Emerging challenges in safeguarding academic integrity."

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A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of our technologies. But it begins with a consideration of what we value.

Slides from my talk today for the Council of Europe's (@coe) @CoE_EU_HF event on “Emerging challenges in safeguarding academic integrity." https://t.co/jX6mxya2PY

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Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

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A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of our technologies. But it begins with a consideration of what we value.

Slides from my talk today for the Council of Europe's (@coe) @CoE_EU_HF event on “Emerging challenges in safeguarding academic integrity." pic.twitter.com/jX6mxya2PY
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) July 7, 2022

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A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of our technologies. But it begins with a consideration of what we value.

Slides from my talk today for the Council of Europe's (@coe) @CoE_EU_HF event on “Emerging challenges in safeguarding academic integrity." https://t.co/jX6mxya2PY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of our technologies. But it begins with a consideration of what we value.

Slides from my talk today for the Council of Europe's (@coe) @CoE_EU_HF event on “Emerging challenges in safeguarding academic integrity." https://t.co/jX6mxya2PY

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A discussion of pedagogy needs to include a critical examination of our technologies. But it begins with a consideration of what we value.

Slides from my talk today for the Council of Europe's (@coe) @CoE_EU_HF event on “Emerging challenges in safeguarding academic integrity."

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For the homework today, I've got a narrative of my ungrading practice here: Ungrading.LauraGibbs.net. It's the chapter I contributed to the UNGRADING book edited by Susan Blum, and she negotiated with the publisher that we are free to reuse, reprint, republish, etc. our individual chapters. Rissa has a chapter in there too which is soooooooo good. One of my fav things about the book is that it also includes contributions from K-12 teachers and they have very much been the leaders in this movement; when I first got started, I was looking to K-12 teachers like Joe Bower and Starr Sackstein for encouragement and affirmation. Even though they face way more institutional barriers than most higher ed faculty, they led the way.

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Twitter thread with liquid syllabus & ungrading info by Lindsay Masland

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Twitter thread with liquid syllabus & ungrading info by Lindsay Masland

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https://twitter.com/lindsaymasland/status/1482040586748182534?s=21&t=CcoL2iJfh-kEc7niQxVXow

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@kellytribble @jerodq @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Also, because I am feeling very "open book" today riding the post-class high, here are the slides I used to introduce this to class today.  A link to my liquid syllabus is also in the notes of Slide 4, and the syllabus has additional ungrading links. :) https://t.co/94hzSV9rly

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Agenda for PSY 3010 Syllabus Q&A (with poll) Understanding Ungrading (with Padlet) Building our Class (with Padlet) While waiting for class to start, please share in the chat ideas of movies I can watch with my kids during the snowstorm!

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@kellytribble @jerodq @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Also, because I am feeling very "open book" today riding the post-class high, here are the slides I used to introduce this to class today.  A link to my liquid syllabus is also in the notes of Slide 4, and the syllabus has additional ungrading links. :) https://t.co/94hzSV9rly

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@jerodq @LindsayMasland @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Brilliant!  Many thanks for this!

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Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

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Also, because I am feeling very "open book" today riding the post-class high, here are the slides I used to introduce this to class today. A link to my liquid syllabus is also in the notes of Slide 4, and the syllabus has additional ungrading links. :) https://t.co/94hzSV9rly
— Dr. Lindsay Masland (@LindsayMasland) January 14, 2022

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Agenda for PSY 3010 Syllabus Q&A (with poll) Understanding Ungrading (with Padlet) Building our Class (with Padlet) While waiting for class to start, please share in the chat ideas of movies I can watch with my kids during the snowstorm!

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@kellytribble @jerodq @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Also, because I am feeling very "open book" today riding the post-class high, here are the slides I used to introduce this to class today.  A link to my liquid syllabus is also in the notes of Slide 4, and the syllabus has additional ungrading links. :) https://t.co/94hzSV9rly

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@jerodq @LindsayMasland @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Brilliant!  Many thanks for this!

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@kellytribble @jerodq @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Also, because I am feeling very "open book" today riding the post-class high, here are the slides I used to introduce this to class today.  A link to my liquid syllabus is also in the notes of Slide 4, and the syllabus has additional ungrading links. :) https://t.co/94hzSV9rly

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@kellytribble @jerodq @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Also, because I am feeling very "open book" today riding the post-class high, here are the slides I used to introduce this to class today.  A link to my liquid syllabus is also in the notes of Slide 4, and the syllabus has additional ungrading links. :) https://t.co/94hzSV9rly

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Agenda for PSY 3010 Syllabus Q&A (with poll) Understanding Ungrading (with Padlet) Building our Class (with Padlet) While waiting for class to start, please share in the chat ideas of movies I can watch with my kids during the snowstorm!

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@jerodq @LindsayMasland @Jessifer @SusanDebraBlum Brilliant!  Many thanks for this!

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A beginning primer (admittedly from several years ago)

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A beginning primer (admittedly from several years ago)

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* Grades are not good incentive or effective feedback
* Grades are not good markers of learning
* Grades encourage competitiveness over collaboration
* Grades pit students and teachers against each other
* Grades are mechanisms of institutional control
* Grades aren't fair

- Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) January 1, 2020

Alfie Kohn (2011) made a case for a modern ungrading by arguing that assessment entails collecting " information about how students are doing, and then [sharing] that information (along with our judgments, perhaps) with the students...[and modern assessment is distracting us from] a pair of remarkable conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the subject: Collecting information doesn't require tests, and sharing that information doesn't require grades" (Kohn, 2011, p.1, [brackets] are mine). Susan Blum (2017) went on to make a more in-depth argument against grades:

And in my research on learning and education, I had learned a lot about grades, such as:

Grading requires uniformity. It assumes uniform input, uniform process and uniform output. I stopped believing that was a useful way to approach student learning. Students don't start out the same. They don't have the same life experiences -- or even academic experiences -- during our semester together. They don't go to the same places afterward. They have different goals.

Grades don't provide adequate information. If the purpose of grades is to convey a student's accomplishment, adequacy, excellence, compliance, effort and/or gain in learning, then they fail. Is a student who enters already knowing a lot and continues to demonstrate knowledge at a high level, but then misses an assignment because of a roommate's attempted suicide and ends up with a B-plus, the same as someone who begins knowing nothing, works really hard, follows all the rules, does quite well and ends up with a B-plus? What information is conveyed? What about someone who loves biology and excels in those classes, but who loathes history, bombs in history classes and ends up with a 3.0 GPA? Compared to someone who muddles through every class and a similar GPA, yet with no passion, excellence or highs or lows? What do we learn from the GPA? What does a course grade mean?

Grades don't truly motivate students. Experts [Ryan & Deci, 2000] distinguish different types of motivation: 1) intrinsic, or doing things for their own sake and 2) extrinsic, or doing things for external benefits not inherently part of the activities themselves. I would also add fear and avoidance as big motivators, or doing something to avoid negative consequences. (Blum, 2017, p.1, [brackets] are mine)

Therefore ungrading, for me, is a process within my exam grading that I use to focus student attention on individual constructive and specific feedback (with no numbers attached) and that involves a conversation between the student and the instructor. I provide feedback to the students and the students provide feedback to me about their answers and why they might think their answers are still correct, even if I have provided feedback to the contrary. The conversation via written feedback combined with the oral conversation that happens once the written feedback process has ended has been illuminating in terms of what mastery learning entails. In addition, I have learned a lot about how to scaffold my students' learning in future semesters.

: This ungrading process divorced feedback from grades. It included student assignment of point totals, corrections, reflections on exam performance, and the ability to argue that questions were unfair. Most of the specifics of prototype I have been discussed extensively if you're interested in more information (Sorensen-Unruh, 2019d).

: This "ungrading" process assigned grades, did not focus on feedback, and essentially eliminated the conversation between instructor and student concerning exam grades. It included corrections, reflections on exam performance, and the ability to argue that questions were unfair. Most of the specifics of prototype II have been discussed extensively if you're interested in more information (Sorensen-Unruh, 2020a).

Reflections on Implementation : This implementation allowed students some say over their grades. If ceding to students some measure of agency over their grades is the main point of ungrading, then this implementation did provide for a small measure. When I designed it based on student feedback from the first implementation, I thought this prototype would move towards ungrading. It seemed to fall squarely within my students' wheelhouse, and they liked this implementation. They did not need to be sold on its virtues. Yet, it was still basically a grading process with some added reflection. It wasn't an ungrading process at all as the focus was not on direct feedback.

Perhaps it was an implementation of something that squarely fell in between grading and ungrading? Handing back the exams with grades on them and little feedback seems to defy all of the tenets of ungrading. Being unable to significantly converse about grades with my students significantly defied my own definition of ungrading. And, still, my students felt like they had a voice in their own grading outcomes. So, prototype II wasn't a traditional grading scheme but it wasn't ungrading either. The reality, though, is that this version of somewhere in between ungrading and grading is the version most STEM folks I know would be willing to implement first. Maybe it is a starting point for those folks in their ungrading journey; an implementation that starts to feel like ungrading but isn't quite ungrading yet...

ecause this "ungrading" process failed to give feedback (and thus divorce feedback from grades) and provided little time for an oral conversation between instructor and student concerning exam grades, I would probably not implement it again (never say never, right?).

: This ungrading process divorces feedback from grades. It includes student assignment of point totals, corrections, reflections on exam performance, and the ability to argue that questions were unfair. Most of the specifics of prototype III have been briefly captured if you're interested in more information (Sorensen-Unruh, 2020b).

Ungrading, at its essence, involves ceding power (that has pretty exclusively belonged to us as instructors) to our students in terms of monitoring and assessing their own progress. It allows students to reflect on their learning and to learn what they need to do to enhance their future learning. Ungrading promotes student learning and assessment in ways that are sometimes explicit and sometimes hidden, but it ultimately requires us as instructors to buy into training students skills that are critical within our students' schooling and within their lives (performance reviews require the exact same skills). Ungrading is an investment - of time, of effort, and of love - in our students' futures, and, for me, it has been a critical investment that is now an essential part of my pedagogy.

Blum,S.D. (2017). The Significant Learning Benefits of getting rid of grades. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/11/14/significant-learning-benefits-getting-rid-grades-essay

Burbules, N. C., & Berk, R. (1999). . In T.S. Popkewitz & L. Fendler (Eds). Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits Critical Theories in Education. New York City, NY: Routledge.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), pp. 81-112. Retrieved from

Kohn, A. (November 2011). The case against grades [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

Ryan, R. & Deci, E. (2000). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, pp. 54-67. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1020 Retrieved (for free) from https://mmrg.pbworks.com/f/Ryan,+Deci+00.pdf

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (September 4, 2019a). Critical Thinking vs. Critical Pedagogy [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.chemedx.org/blog/critical-thinking-vs-critical-pedagogy

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (October 2, 2019b). Practical Classroom Implementations for Critical Pedagogy [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.chemedx.org/blog/practical-classroom-implementations-critical-pedagogy

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (@RissaChem). (January 1, 2019c). . Do y'all ever worry about undergrads' (1st 2 yrs) lack of tolerance for nebulous grades (due to ungrading & feedback oriented practices)? Worried my Ss will balk at not knowing their grades at all times [Twitter post]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/RissaChem/status/1080212845558550529

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (February 2, 2019d). Ungrading: A Series [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://clarissasorensenunruh.com/2019/02/10/ungrading-a-series-part-1/

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (January 2, 2020a). Ungrading: Prototype II (General Chemistry II) [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://clarissasorensenunruh.com/2020/01/03/ungrading-prototype-ii-general-chemistry-ii/

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (January 3, 2020b). Ungrading: Prototype III (Envisioned Large Lecture Implementation in General Chemistry I) [Blog Post]. https://clarissasorensenunruh.com/2020/01/03/ungrading-prototype-iii-envisioned-large-lecture-implementation-in-general-chemistry-i/

Stommel, J. (October 26, 2017), Why I Don't Grade [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/

Stommel, J. (March 11, 2018). How to Ungrade [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/

Underwood, J. S., & Tregidgo, A. P. (2010). Improving student writing through effective feedback: Best practices and recommendations. Journal of Teaching Writing, 22(2), 73-98.

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Ungrading: What is it and why should we use it?

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Ungrading has long been associated with the idea of purposefully eliminating or minimizing the use of points or letters to assess student work. The focus of ungrading is to provide extensive feedback to students and then jointly (students and instructors) come to a consensus as to what the grade should be.

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#Ungrading Resource Page (which links other resource pages too)

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#Ungrading Resource Page (which links other resource pages too)

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This page is officially here: https://stem.dpl.online/ungrading/ and was designed by me (Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh) and Courtney Sobers (@DrCJSobers).

Here are some beginning reflection questions to consider when you're contemplating whether to ungrade in your classroom.

Thinking through the assessments we give in our courses:

1. What do you hope your students will take away from these assignments/assessments as a whole?

2. What do you hope your students will take away from each assignment/assessment?

3. How do you hope your students will interpret your evaluation of these assignments/assessments?

4. Are there any assignments/assessments that you could grade binarily or without a percentage based scale?

5. Are there any assignments/assessments for which you could eliminate grading altogether?

6. For those assignments/assessments you mentioned in #5, will you give feedback individually or as a class? Would peer evaluation be useful here?

Open Resources

Introductions to ungrading:
https://www.chemedx.org/blog/ungrading-what-it-and-why-should-we-use-it
UCI Ungrading Introduction: https://youtu.be/O-soa6F7hkM
https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-introduction/
Open CoLab Webinar - https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/resource/ungrading-webinar/

On grading:

Asao Inoue's Grading history blogs are an awesome place to begin your journey: (1) Where does grading come from?; (2) Why does conventional grading feel so unfair?; (3) Do grades help students learn in classrooms?; (4) What is a labor-based grading system and how will it produce a final course grade in a writing course?; (5) What does a labor-based grading system afford you as a student and learner in a writing course?

On why you'd ungrade:

Stommel, J. (2017 October 26). Why I don't grade [Blog Post].

Blum, S. (2017 November 14). Ungrading. Inside Higher Ed.

Stommel, J. (2021 June 2). Grades are dehumanizing; Ungrading is no simple solution [Talk Transcript].

Morris, S. M. (2021 June 9). When we talk about grades, we are talking about people [Talk Transcript].

What evaluative practices are under the umbrella term ungrading:

Dr. Renée Link and Courtney discuss specifications grading in large (1k+) lecture and lab courses and things anyone considering alternative assessment should know.

UCI mini-seminars on Mastery, Specs, and Ungrading - https://tea.dtei.uci.edu/mini-seminars/

Variations in Implementation of Specifications Grading in STEM Courses (covers Chem, Phys, Math, etc.) - https://go.rutgers.edu/x8yb0jl9

Specs Grading Blogs - https://rtalbert.org/specs-grading-iteration-winner/, https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/reneelink/specifications-grading-resources/

Labor-Based Contracts blogs (also listed above) - What is a labor-based grading system and how will it produce a final course grade in a writing course?, What does a labor-based grading system afford you as a student and learner in a writing course?

Standards-Based Grading - http://matthematics.com/standards-based-grading-origins/, http://matthematics.com/standards-based-grading-my-implementation/

Contract Grading and Peer Review - https://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2015/08/16/getting-started-6-contract-grading-and-peer-review

On how you can ungrade:

Stommel, J. (2018 March 11). How to ungrade [Blog post].

Gibbs, L. (n.d.). Anatomy of an Online Course [Blog post].

Sorensen-Unruh, C. (2019 February 10). Ungrading: A Series (Part 1) [Blog post].

Blum, S. (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.

More information on ungrading (bibliographies, FAQ, etc.):

Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts on Ungrading: https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/ungrading/, https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/how-to-ungrade/, https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/antiracist-writing-assessment-ecologies/,

Stommel, J. (2020 March 3). Ungrading: A bibliography [Blog Post].

Stommel, J. (2020 February 6). Ungrading: An FAQ [Blog Post].

Jessamyn Neuhaus's Ungrading Bibliography
Ungrading Resources from Plymouth State University Open Co-Lab

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This page is officially here: https://stem.dpl.online/ungrading/ and was designed by me (Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh) and Courtney Sobers (@DrCJSobers). Here are some beginning reflection questions to consider when you're contemplating whether to ungrade in your classroom. Thinking through the assessments we give in our courses: What do you hope your students will take away from these assignments/assessments...

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Paula Smith-Hawkins here, CNM

Write something incredible? Well, it's more of a question than a comment. In progressive grading, I offer points for a self-assessment at the start of the week. I provide guided questions so students can get their bearings for the topics, then self-asses what they know/don't know about it. What kind of feedback can I give here besides, "this is a great start", etc.?

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Just introducing myself. I'm an early career lecturer haphazardly trying to incorporate more ungrading practices into my courses. I've been intersted in ungrading for 2 years, but now I have the chance to really experiment with it. My challenge and question now is how to ungrade in an institution that needs to see grade distributions from my classes? I am 100% committed to and believe in ungrading as an invaluable learning condition for students. But, I often feel like the only one in my institution! Looking forward to learning more from everyone in the July sessions. -Shelley

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And a YouTube video with Dr. Julie McGurk and Dr. Jamiella Brooks (see also this Chronicle rigor piece featuring both of them also).

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Dr Julie McGurk & Dr Jamiella Brooks: Rigor as Inclusive Practice

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In this piece of Becky Supiano at the Chronicle (who has also written a lot for the Chronicle about ungrading), she talks with Rissa, Jamiella Brooks, and many others about rigor and the "rigor wars" ... it's a good read and (as far as I can tell), not paywalled at the Chronicle: REDEFINITION OF RIGOR.

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Such a wonderful blog post from Cate Denial! Lots of details, and embedded PDFs of the reflection prompts and other activities, so much stuff: Going Gradeless

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Munir Fasheh (Palestinian Math educator). Grading.. is DEGRADING

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Munir Fasheh (Palestinian Math educator). Grading.. is DEGRADING

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The Trouble with Knowledge

The Trouble with Knowledge

The Trouble with Knowledge Munir Fasheh
Director, Arab Education Forum
EXPO 2000: A Global Dialogue on "Building Learning Societies -
Knowledge, Information and Human Development"
Hanover, Germany (September 6-8, 2000)

A wish
Cocoon

Along a dusty road in India there sat a beggar who sold cocoons. A young boy watched him day after day, and the beggar finally beckoned to him.

"Do you know what beauty lies within this chrysalis? I will give you one so you might see for yourself. But you must be careful not to handle the cocoon until the butterfly comes out."

The boy was enchanted with the gift and hurried home to await the butterfly. He laid the cocoon on the floor and became aware of a curious thing. The butterfly was beating its fragile wings against the hard wall of the chrysalis until it appeared it would surely perish, before it could break the unyielding prison. Wanting only to help, the boy swiftly pried the cocoon open.

Out flopped a wet, brown, ugly thing which quickly died. When the beggar discovered what had happened, he explained to the boy "In order for the butterfly wings to grow strong enough to support him, it is necessary that he beat them against the walls of his cocoon. Only by this struggle can his wings become beautiful and durable. When you denied him that struggle, you took away from him his only chance of survival."

May the walls of your cocoon,

Be just thick enough,

To allow you to struggle,

Just long enough,

to emerge,

The beautiful person,

I already know you to be]

Many societies met a fate similar to the cocoon through development and assistance programs, which lacked the wisdom embedded in life and in the "soil of cultures." Since the development age was launched by Truman some 50 years ago (through declaring all societies outside the Western world "underdeveloped" and, thus, in need of "assistance" to "develop" them), education, development programs and knowledge have been the main tools used in breaking the back (chrysalis) of societies (though not with the same innocence that the boy had). The story of the boy and the cocoon also tells what we (as parents and teachers) often do: we break the "chrysalis" of our children and students by trying to help them, thus denying them to learn and build the internal natural strength they need in order to be the beautiful persons they are.

First Main Trouble with Knowledge and Education: Dishonesty

I do believe that one aspect which characterizes education, development and the production and dissemination of knowledge, in today's world, is the lack of intellectual honesty. This belief is an outcome of being true to life as I experienced it, through my years of schooling and my almost 40 years of work. The dishonesty is connected to the values, which govern the thinking and practice in the fields of education, knowledge and development: control, winning and competition. Having a syllabus and textbooks, and evaluating and judging people (students, teachers, administrators, and academics) through linear forms of authority and through linear symbolic values (such as arbitrary letters or grades or preferential labels), almost guarantee cheating, lack of honesty, and lack of relevance (1). I taught many years and put exams both at the level of classrooms and at the national level, and I labored and spent a lot of time and effort in order to be fair. But, then, I discovered that the problem is not in the intentions or the way we conduct things but, rather, in the values that run societies in general and which are propagated by education, development and knowledge -- among other means. Thus, the main trouble with knowledge and education, is not so much their irrelevance or process of selection or the issue of power (though these are definitely part of the trouble) as it is with the lack of intellectual honesty in these areas. Giving a number or a letter to measure a human being is dishonest and inhuman. It is probably the biggest abuse of mathematics in its history! Moreover, as long as the above-mentioned values remain as the governing values, talking about fundamental improvement in education is a contradiction in terms; simply, it is not possible. Labeling a child as a "failure" is a criminal act against that child. For a child, who has learned so much from life before entering school, to be labeled a failure, just because s/he doesn't see any sense in the mostly senseless knowledge we offer in most schools, is unfair - to say the least. But very few around the world seem to be outraged, simply because we usually lose our senses in the process of getting educated. We are like those in Hans Christian Anderson's story that lost their ability to see and had to be reminded by the little child that the emperor is without clothes.

People in the educational world have to be dishonest (often without realizing it) either because they are too lazy to reflect on and see the absurdities in what they are doing (and thus they just give to students what they themselves were given in schools and universities, or during training courses and enrichment seminars by the experts of course), or because they are simply afraid and they have to protect themselves from punishment or from being judged and labeled as failures. I had a friend who was working in a prestigious university in the U.S. and who often went as an educational consultant and expert to countries to improve and develop their educational systems. Once, while he was on his way to Egypt as a consultant to help in reforming the educational systemthere, I asked him, "Have you ever been to Egypt?" He said no. I said, "Don't you find it strange that you don't know Egypt but you know what is good for it?!" Obviously, the richness, the wisdom and the depth of that 7000-year civilization is totally ignored by him, or more accurately, cannot be comprehended by him. In a very real sense, he doesn't only abstract the theories he carries along with him everywhere but also abstracts the people by assuming that they all have the same deficits and, thus, the same solution.

Let's take the term "sustainable development," for example, which is widely used today and it is used in the concept paper for this conference. If we mean by development what we see in "developed" nations, then sustainable development is a nightmare. If we all start consuming, for example, at the rate at which "developed" nations currently do, then we need at least five planets to provide the needed resources and to provide dumping sites for our waste! If "developing" nations consume natural resources (such as water) at the same rate "developed" nations do, such resources would be depleted in few years! Such "development" would be destructive to the soil of the earth and to the soil of cultures, both of which nurture and sustain human beings and human societies. The price would be so high at the level of the environment and at the level of beautiful relationships among people. Thus, those who believe in sustainable development (in its current conception and practice) are either naïve or dishonest or right-out indifferent to what happens to nature, to beautiful relationship among people, and to the joyful harmony within human beings and between them and their surroundings. Nature and relationships among human beings are probably the two most precious treasures in life; the most valuable of what human beings have. The survival of human and natural diversity, even of human communities, are at stake here.

We do not detect dishonesty in the fields of education, knowledge and development because usually we are protected (in schools) from having much contact with life, through stressing verbal, symbolic and technical "knowledge," through avoiding people's experiences and surroundings, through the means we follow in evaluating people, and through ignoring history (history of people, of ideas, ...). During the 1970s, for example, and as the head supervisor of math instruction in all the schools of the West Bank (in Palestine), one question I kept asking children was "is 1=1?" 1=1 is true in schoolbooks and on tests but in real life it has uses, abuses and misuses, but no real examples. We abstract apples in textbooks and make them equal but in real life there is no apple which is exactly equal to another apple. When students and teachers protested, I said "just use your senses and your experiences. 1=1 is not a universally true statement. Similarly, 1+1=2 is true only in very limited cases. Saying otherwise is simply part of the dishonesty in teaching! The same is true when we say that Newton discovered gravity. Almost every child by the age of one discovers it. (When my grandson, for example, was 15 months old, I was watching him once pick up pieces of cereal and put them in his mouth. Every time he lost a piece, he would look for it down, never up!) By teaching that Newton discovered gravity, we do not only lie but also fail to clarify Newton's real contribution. Similarly with teaching that Columbus discovered America .... Everyone of us can give hundreds of examples on dishonesty in the way we were taught and the way we teach.

Dominant forms of education, development and knowledge (as I mentioned earlier) abstract the "social majorities" in the world and dump them all under one name: developing nations. This could have been a laughable matter if we did not, and still do not, pay a high price for this dishonesty; it is in a real sense a crime against the social majorities in the world.

Human development is another term that sounds positive and well- meaning but inhuman. How does one develop human beings without ruining them? It is like help developing the cocoon in the Indian story. Or like talking about "flower development." Usually, when the term "human development" is used, it usually means that people become better consumers or more useful to the consumer society. It could also mean more useful to the control system.

The value of schools is related mainly to its relation to the spheres of influence than to any intrinsic value in them. The best example I can give is the closure of Palestinian schools and universities by Israel for almost four years. As a result of the closure, Israel faced a real problem. What would it do with the students when they don't move from one grade to another? It had to do something; otherwise it would have faced four times the number of students waiting to enter the first grade with all the repercussions (economic, political, social ...) associated with that The solution was to promote all students in all grades to the next grade! This happened every year for four years. What made things more absurd was the fact that the results on the national general exam at the end of the school cycle were the highest ever in the history of the exam! I wrote an article in al-Quds newspaper then saying that Palestinians seem to be on the verge of being all geniuses without studying a word!! Even worse: Palestinian parents and teachers did not object to this dishonesty, because they did not want their children and students to repeat any grade. Actually, everyone seemed to be happy with that dishonest solution! The fact is that they all seem to realize that education is a farce and that economic and other considerations can easily take over, without any objection from any soul, including concerned educators! Each party justified it easily.

Equating education with learning is part of the dishonesty; so is calling the casting of votes every few years democracy; and so is calling cola a drink, or potato chips food. In this sense, the call to improve education is like the call to improve cola or the call to improve elections. The problem is not with the brand or the quality of the cola but with the cola itself. The solution in such cases is simple and obvious: to reclaim water as the main source for drinking, to reclaim our lives and cultural spaces as the main source for learning, and to reclaim our responsibility in running our affairs as the main source for governing.

In February 1999, I was in Yemen participating in a workshop on working with youth. There were about 40 young people from 5 Arab countries, in addition to some adults. A school principal (who herself is involved with groups on the Right of the Child) told the following story about a 15-year old Yemeni girl. In one of the meetings that took place before our arrival (which was one of many meetings held to introduce and advocate the rights of children), that girl -- after a long and elaborate introduction by several "experts" about the rights of children -- asked two questions. One question was, "My government signed the Treaty in my name without discussing it with me. Isn't it my right to have had it discussed with me before it signed it?! Isn't that one of my fundamental rights? I am 15 years old and I can read and voice my opinion ... ....". [Her question would not have carried much weight if the government of Yemen was the only government that ignored this fundamental right: consulting people and youth before signing anything in their name. Almost all governments did.] The girl's second question was, "You talk about education as a right. I go to school every day, and I get bored and insulted in it every day. Nothing in the curriculum reflects my life. Nothing is relevant. ... ... If this is what you refer to as the right to education, please protect me from this right. If you need a job, please don't let me pay the price." That girl, with her clear mind and honest expression, exposed the hypocrisy of the "experts," of the treaty, and the way it is legitimized around the world through hegemonic organizations, sweet packaging, and sometimes through force (just think of the expression "compulsory education"! It is like talking about compulsory eating. If it is a truly natural need, why do we need to have it compulsory?! We seem to have forgotten that learning is as natural as life itself, almost synonymous to living. But that natural process does not exist in education. Something unnatural and horrible exists instead. That's why it has to be compulsory!) That girl dismantled the logic and exposed the hypocrisy of both experts and world organizations with an innocent persistence, exactly like the child in Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the Emperor's New Clothes: "But the emperor has nothing on at all!" That girl was not yet constrained by the forces that blinded and silenced the adult "experts" and caused them to "see" what is not there, and not to see what is there.

A last example about the dishonesty is embedded in the term globalization. I have been married for 33 years and as a result a lot has changed in me and a lot has changed in my wife. But a lot has refused to change although we have been trying to change certain aspects in each other for those 33 years. We simply failed. We are still struggling to understand each other. Thus, talking about globalization in the sense we can understand the world is an example of dishonesty as big as the word globalization itself! If by the time I die, I succeed in understanding my wife fully, I will have accomplished a lot. Accordingly, understanding the world has only one meaning: an illusion. It can only mean something in the language of control. Moreover, it is true that a person can communicate with millions of people around the world, but most probably lose the ability to communicate with those living in one's home. That person, probably, has difficulty in communicating with real people; s/he probably has difficulty in striking a meaningful conversation with another person. Two thousand years ago, a famous Palestinian with the name of Jesus Christ, said, "what benefit man if s/he gains the whole world but loses herself/ himself?!" Talking about Jesus, He probably was the first to talk about "globalization" in a totally different sense: the oneness of human beings; that they are all children of God. No developed or chosen ones.

People are autonomous human beings, full organic creatures, with their ways, habits, etc, that resist arbitrary change. We cannot just impose change without breaking the very essence of people and societies - without breaking their "chrysalis." For a person or organization to go to a place as rich in culture as Egypt or India and impose a solution from outside is shear arrogance. History has not known a more destructive form of arrogance - done in the name of help, assistance, development, and progress, i.e. coupled with hypocrisy. In this sense, an expert is a person who has lost his senses and is driven by an illusion, by self interest, and by plastic words (that may look shiny but have no life, and usually are distortive and destructive).

Second Main Trouble with Knowledge and Education:

Lack of Connection to the Lives of the Social Majorities in the World

I cannot subscribe to a system that ignores the lives and ways of living of the social majorities in the world. I cannot subscribe to a system that is geared to 20% of the students and calls the other 80% failures, dropouts, misfits, ... and blames for that! It behooves me how most people today accept a system that produces so many useless people; in fact, in most societies, it changes them from people who potentially are able to deal with most of their needs into useless people incapable of satisfying any of their needs.

I asked hundreds of teachers why they were teaching what they were teaching and no one really seemed to know -- in the sense that they did not have an answer that came from their innermost convictions. One answer, which was often mentioned, was "because it was needed in the university"! When I said "but only 20 or so percent of the students go to universities, what do you do for the other 80%? Don't you care about them?!" most would respond "but they didn't work hard enough, they don't deserve to go to a university. They are the ones to be blamed, they failed to earn a decent life ..."!! The way to heaven has many gates, but there seems to be only one gate to success in life in modern societies: the school! Among the teachers whom I asked that question and who were more honest said "we teach what we teach because we are told to do so, we get paid for it, and we never thought of what happens to the majority of students." This fact seemed to be true about various aspects in the world today; education just mirrors that fact and help justify it.

In other words, the second trouble with education, development and knowledge is not so much with what they offer as with what they conceal, marginalize, make invisible, or render worthless. The problem is with the values that they embody in their assumptions and practices (which are very different from what they espouses in public). The example which I always give to illustrate this is the "discovery" of my illiterate mother's math around the year 1976. [For details, see my article "Community Education: To Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible" in the Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 60, No.1, February, 1990.] What was particularly significant about that discovery (in relation to the discussion here), is that it is almost impossible to teach her type of math and her type of knowledge, using the means, methods, concepts, and structures of what we refer to as education, no matter how much we improve it! Her type of math and knowledge can only be learned and acquired through life itself; through living and doing in real settings. It would be impossible for me, thus, to do what she was able to do, even if I spend another 20 years of study in the "best" schools and universities! Another significant aspect of her type of knowledge is the fact that she was able to make a living out of it in almost any setting, while mine was "meaningful" and earned money only in particular, mainly artificial and hegemonic, settings.

The assumption that people are born ignorant and that they need education to make them able to function well in life may be true about a place like the USA, where people are usually kept separated from real life and detached from the daily means of living. In contrast, in a place like Palestine, where people were accustomed to producing most of their essential needs, it is ridiculous to talk about education as a need; it was more of a hindrance and a dismantler than a need. Increasingly, Palestinians are losing this ability. To mention one small (but illustrative and significant) example, it is extremely difficult to find in Palestine today the type of bread which was the only bread when I was growing up: bread made totally of healthy (naturally organic) whole wheat with all its natural nutrients. Within the Palestinian tradition, that kind of bread was treated as sacred. When a piece, for example, fell on the ground, we were made as children to pick it up and kiss it. Today, not only this ritual has disappeared but also that kind of healthy bread, and with it a whole way of life which provided people with most of their basic and essential needs. We are becoming almost as handicapped as the Americans in providing for our daily needs - thanks to education, universal declarations and development programs! Today, we probably rank among the top peoples in the world in terms of skills of demanding rights, begging for jobs, and writing funding proposals!

What helped me get out of the dominant mode of thinking was not a superior intellect or a divine revelation, but my life as a Palestinian and my culture (as embodied for example in my mother's ways of doing, knowing and living). Both "saved" me and put me back on the path of life and learning and away from the plastic world I internalized through my schooling and universalizing. Obviously, that did not happen overnight, but through a continuous struggle for almost three decades (and which is still going on within me). Since the discovery of my mother's math, I have been working very hard to heal myself in the inside, to regain my internal natural "immune" system, to reconstruct my "inner world" and to restitch the social cultural spiritual fabric with real people and with the world around me. It needed all that time, effort and healing for me to be able to stand in front of people and have the courage to say that education, development and knowledge are without clothes.

Often, we are given the impression that people in the "Third World" welcomed western education with open arms and with no critical attitude. Far from it. The story of the history of Palestinians' conceptions of 'education' is very telling in this regard. It probably mirrors the history of peoples' conceptions in many other places. Education was first introduced into Palestine by missionaries and religious organizations in the late 19th century and early 20th century. After WWI, the British occupiers of Palestine imposed their curricula, books, structures and ways as well as their systems of measures and evaluation on people (such as the London Metriculation). This was resisted by important segments of the Palestinian society who saw its alien character, its political agenda, and its irrelevance and hegemony. One segment was exemplified by the Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini, who lived and practiced his concept of learning in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. (In 1990, he wrote a book in Arabic with the title "Wearing Someone Else's Shoes.") The other segment was exemplified by the peasants of Palestine who organized a conference in Jaffa in 1929 and asked questions about the relevance of the new curricula and what do we want education to do. These questions and concerns (which were manifestations of resistance to the blind adoption and implementation of ready curricula and solutions) were dismissed by the Palestinian elite in the towns and cities in Palestine, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa and, gradually, education became a "need" felt by most Palestinians, and a "universal right" demanded by most! Today, it is almost like an addiction! At the same time, however, in spite of all appearances to the contrary (such as Palestinians continuing to build more schools and universities, and to generate more certificates) many Palestinians today are increasingly doubtful about the promises of education, and critical of its assumptions. Today, many see it as a false Messiah, as a dismantler of life, as a fragmenter of the mind and society, and as a crusher of dignity and self worth for the majority of people. If warplanes and army tanks flatten houses, education along with development programs and universal declarations flatten people's minds and souls, through linear thinking (such as the concept of progress), through scientific/ mathematical "facts" (such as 1=1), through universal claims (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and through killing diversity and ignoring the richness and wisdom in cultures and communities. More people seem to see the danger and, thus, are ready to entertain alternatives to what is presented today as "natural," and to work within different assumptions, values and paradigms. This reminds us of how a member of the Zapatistas (in Mexico), who are struggling to regain their lives and cultural spaces, responded to a question, "Changing the world is very very difficult, almost impossible. What we are trying to do is create a whole new world, where many worlds fit."! This, in my opinion, is the real challenge facing us in the 21st century. What makes the task easy is that these many worlds already exist!

Building Learning Societies: Approaches to Learning

From what has been said so far, two main approaches to knowledge and learning can be identified: (1) learning by doing; i.e. by being embedded in life. In this approach, learning is almost synonymous to living, and (2) the formal approach, which usually starts with ready pre-prepared content, and which embodies tests and grades.

The two approaches differ mainly in terms of values (whether one is aware of them or not). The first approach values life (as people/ learners experience it, and not as experts define it); it values, diversity, lack of fragmentation, relatedness of the various aspects in life, human dignity, honesty, freedom, truth, and linking words and thoughts with actions. In addition, it avoids hypocrisy and arrogance. [In short, the values mentioned in Tagore's quote, which appears underneath the title of this Workshop 21.] The second approach embodies mainly the values of competition, winning, control (control of meanings, people, measures and outcomes). These values usually lead to fragmentation, cheating, self-defensiveness and, thus, to the tearing of the inner world of people and tearing the social spiritual fabric of communities.

If we use our senses and regain our honesty as human beings, we cannot but see the crime we are committing in changing three quarters of students from human beings into useless unemployable people; people who are unable to make a living or to satisfy any of their needs. They are useless to their communities and education is useless to them. Many capitals around the world (but mostly in what is termed as the Third World) are increasingly witnessing demonstrations by holders of Masters and PhD degrees, demanding jobs from governments. This is a new phenomenon in history. Just imagine how much we have deteriorated: a PhD holder is incapable of making a living by himself and is asking his new "daddy" to find him a job. They have learned about their right to demonstrate, demand, and express, but lost their ability to live and how to make a living. The fact is: any one who has gotten nothing but education is basically handicapped; he cannot make a living by himself.

Education produces a majority that is uprooted from their soil of culture and give them false promises and empty expectations. It deprives them of hope and has absolutely no respect to that kind of soil without which human beings just lose learning how to break their "chrysalis" and live on their own in life. Breaking their "chrysalis" is the only way to give them internal strength. Instead of learning this, and going through that natural and healthy struggle, they learn how to fight one another over meaningless and lifeless symbols as diplomas. They grow up not even being able to see or comprehend the richness in their own soils; they learn to despise them. They learn how to import chemicals, hormones and plastic concepts, thinking they can save their peoples. For some and for a while, things may seem to improve. Soon, however, they discover the high price that had to pay at the level of the community, the environment and human relationships. In this sense, my mother's knowledge was not only different but radically different: I was not able to see it for a long time. And when I saw it, I was not able to comprehend it. It was so embedded in life like salt in food: it is impossible to see them separate.

When I say these things, I don't mean that everything in the soil of culture is good. The best example I can give for a person who was grounded in his own culture and at the same time not being blind to some of its horrors (like the cast system) is Ghandi. His adherence to his Indian culture did not stop him from doing something about that system. Living in one's own "cultural soil" does not mean being blind to some of the horrors that it has. But to run out of it would be like trying to get out of one's own skin! It is important that we don't jump into horrors we can do nothing about such as the ones produced by education and development.

Development and education are geared towards 20% of the population, those who can be absorbed into the machine of consumption and compete over its mainly plastic gains. The rest is doomed to the labels of failures, unfit, dropouts, unemployed, underdeveloped, ... They are made to believe that they are to be blamed. The solution, however, is not to go on complaining but to regenerate the soil of their cultures. One hopeful fact along this path is that 80% of what we need is available to us and that 80% of what we currently consume (the junk of modernity) we don't need. This is true whether we are talking about knowledge, food, or entertainment. This is where the hope lies. In all of these areas, protecting our children becomes a much needed challenge rather than acquiring more of these horrors. Too much information, food, and entertainment (even when it is good, which usually is not) causes indigestion, lack of clarity and ability to comprehend.

I know that by saying all what I said above, and by not conforming to the dominant paradigm in thinking about education and rights, I am risking the possibility of appearing marginal, out of my mind, unfit, or merely stupid. But somebody has to play the role of the "fool" and the innocent if we are really serious about saving ourselves and our children from something as hypocritical and as junky (not to say also as dangerous) as universal education and universal declarations. It is about time to shake the dirt off our minds and souls and look at life face to face again: to touch it, smell it, listen to it, live it, and feel its joy and pain. (By the way, this shaking off of the dirt is the literal meaning of the word intifada in Arabic. The Palestinian intifada is a manifestation of reclaiming our lives and regaining spaces.)

I feel I need to clarify one point here. I am not against improving schools and education. I have been involved in doing that for almost three decades, and I still am. A good school is better than a bad school, and every teacher who works on himself/ herself in order to better themselves and improve their ways of relating to students and to knowledge, and thus create better learning environments, definitely form an important part of the process of building a better world. All what I am saying is that it is not enough. It is important that we do not fool ourselves by believing that improving education is a magical recipe for creating a "world where many worlds fit." Education cannot do it. At least some of us need to talk about more fundamental issues and develop and practice different sets of values, different ways of relating to one another and treating each other, different assumptions, and different visions; i.e., to strive to live their various worlds and regain their various cultural spaces.

My Attempts to Create Learning Environments

My first attempts to create learning environments were related to the voluntary work movement in the West Bank (in Palestine) and my work with improving the teaching of math in the schools of the West Bank region. Both were in the 1970s. (At the time I did not call what I was doing "learning environments," I just did what I felt I could do and needed to be done). The driving idea in the voluntary work was, first, how to use the tremendous energy and hope that was then in people (who were mainly students and teachers) in doing needed work in the community. Joy was part of the work: we would walk in the fields, sing, dance, joke, play and also build within ourselves a better understanding of the world we inhabit through conversations among ourselves and with people of all sorts and walks in life. Groups sprang naturally all over: in schools, universities, .... (I wrote more about it in Arabic).

My work with math in schools involved several aspects that I would consider today part of learning environments: small groups in various places and settings, each doing their own thing; a core group that facilitate communication among the various groups and also to articulate some of the common concerns, common vision, and organize common activities; math and science clubs in various schools; open meetings to discuss the new syllabus and any related questions; .... I used to go around visit schools and ask students to give as many meanings and examples of mathematical concepts and "facts." In the clubs, I used to say to students interested in forming a club in their school, "There is no ready material or content. Science and knowledge do not start with ready theories and book questions but by questions that people have. The clubs revolve around questions that you have, so bring what you have and start with them." That first experience for me in creating learning environments opened up ways and possibililities in my imagination which I employed in my work later. One of these was establishing a new course in math for entering first year students at Birzeit University. (2) [FLM]

Then was my experience as Dean of Students at Birzeit University. The atmosphere at Birzeit University during the 1970s was the closest I have experienced in terms of learning environments in any university I studied or worked in. The place was always buzzing with all kinds of activities which included various forms of expression, most of which was the creation of the students themselves. In addition, the spirit and atmosphere in the University was very open, democratic and healthy. At the time, no one called it democratic; there was no need for this "plastic" word. [Unfortunately, like many other aspects around the world, things have deteriorated so much that right now, for example, Birzeit lost that spirit of real democracy and, instead, Birzeit now has a masters program in democracy and human rights!!

Then came the intifada with its most inspiring aspects as a learning environment. Probably the most significant among these aspects is the sense of responsibility and collectivity which people felt at the personal level. Each person asked "what can I do" and went ahead and did it. People learned how to survive with what they had and what the environment provided. It was then that many of us discovered that more than 80% of what was in the market was not really needed, and that 80% of what we need is already there! The intifada inspired the Tamer Institute which I established in 1989. The reading Campaign was one manifestations of the learning environments that were developed through that institute. (See HER ...). Also in 1995, I wrote a small book (in Arabic) as a result of that experience, with the title: "The main challenge is ending the occupation of our minds; and the main means is creating learning environments."

One aspect which is needed is real dialogue between people from the various "worlds" which exist around the world. Currently, such dialogue does not seem to exist. I am talking here about dialogue, not only as an exchange of ideas and experiences, but dialogue through which we build our "inner worlds," stitch the human fabric among cultures and societies, decide to live with a different set of values and regain spaces for our various worlds in a way that makes it possible for them to live with one another -- just like the wild flowers of Palestine do in the Spring season.

Dominant discourses and assumptions do not, in general, enhance real dialogue. Terms such as "developed" and "developing or underdeveloped," for example, reflect a dichotomy in the mind between givers and takers. And it is obvious that there can be no dialogue between givers and takers; there can only be begging. This conference can act as a spring board for a real dialogue to take place - with the explicit purpose of regaining a space for all peoples; a space where people celebrate the diversity which exists in human life, and learn from one another, rather than have the attitude of the "developed" educating the "underdeveloped." England stayed in India for hundreds of years and they seem to have learned nothing from the wisdom of that sub-continent. They - it seems -- didn't even notice it! Actually, they brought nothing back to England except tea and called it "Earl Grey"! Similarly, missionaries who entered our home in Palestine, never tried to learn from my parents' Christianity. These are examples of the fact that learning and arrogance can't go together. Is the situation any better today? Is arrogance on the way out? I don't know. But there seems to be enough people who are fed up with institutions and organizations that claim to save the world via ready recipes and with attitudes like "I am chosen" and who are ready to join efforts to build a happier and saner world; "a world where many worlds fit."

In a sense, what I am talking about here is not free thought and expression (as current discourse and dominant ideology have it, and as experts on civil society, democracy and human rights preach it) but, rather, I am talking about freeing our thoughts and expressions from the junk ideas and "plastic" words that fill current thoughts and expressions. Free thought and expression is like telling people that they have the full freedom to choose what they want to eat from a table that has nothing but junk food! The example which I usually give to illustrate the difference between free thought and freeing thought is the example of what happened when Israel closed all schools and universities in the West Bank and Gaza during the intifada. Israel didn't mind Palestinians shouting and demanding the opening of schools. It even allowed conferences to be held in Jerusalem to criticize the order of closure and demand the opening of schools and universities. That was a manifestation of free thought and expression that does not bother any oppressor; in fact, if anything, it beautifies the oppressor's image. In contrast, when some people freed their thinking from demanding to acting, and started teaching children at homes and in the neighborhoods, Israel issued one of the most notorious military orders in its history: any one who is caught teaching children at his/ her home or in the neighborhood is liable to face the penalty of demolishing his/ her home and up to ten years of imprisonment! That was in August 1988. Freeing one's mind from the confines of where and how learning can take place (i.e. 'breaking the conditioning' process, in the words which my 22 year old son reminded me of) is a totally different and much more fundamental act and a beautiful manifestation of freeing thought and expression, in contrast to free thought and expression.

In today's world, what controls people and communities are the market, the police and ideology as embedded in universal education, universal declarations, and dominant mass media. The governing values in such a world are obvious: winning, controlling, feeling superior to others, defining the world unilaterally and linearly, and greed. In such a world, reclaiming our cultural spaces with various sets of values is a main challenge. It is the real challenge today.

* * * *

Finally, I would like to affirm -- as a form of summary -- certain points and point out to the need of dismantling others:

We need to dismantle the claim that learning can only take place in schools.

We need to dismantle the assumption that teachers can teach what they don't do.

We need to dismantle the hegemony of words like education, development, progress, excellence, and rights and reclaim, instead, words like wisdom, faith, generosity, hope, learning, living, happiness, and duties.

We need to affirm that the vast majority of people go to school not to learn but to get a diploma (exactly like the permit from the Israelis which I need in order to leave Palestine. There is no intrinsic value in either, both are part of oppressive inhumane systems.)

We need to affirm our capacity for doing and learning, not for getting degrees.

We need to affirm and regain the concept and practice of "learning from the world," not "about the world."

We need to affirm that people are the real solution, not the obstacle and not ignorant.

We need to spend more time in conversations face-to-face with one another, in doing things together, in dreaming beautiful dreams, and in building shared visions. In short, we need to reclaim our lives and regain our cultural spaces.

Two thousand years ago, a wise Palestinian with the name of Jesus Christ asked us to see the wood in our eye before we see the speck in the other person's eye. Another man from the same region with the name of Mohammad defined religion as the way we treat one another. We will do well and good if we reclaim a space in our lives for those types of wisdom, and make them part of our guiding principles in creating "a world where many worlds fit."

The challenge in building learning societies, thus, does not lie in the realm of introducing new technology or changing policy or talking about technical matters but, rather, in the realm of values: to reclaim honesty in thought, practice and expression; to develop again qualities of generosity and responsibility; to regain respect for people and for the diversity and richness in life and cultures; and to reclaim our senses (to learn again to see, listen, feel, care, ...).

This paper is a personal testimony of part of my story with language, literacy, and knowledge.

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The Trouble with Knowledge The Trouble with Knowledge The Trouble with Knowledge Munir FashehDirector, Arab Education Forum EXPO 2000: A Global Dialogue on "Building Learning Societies -Knowledge, Information and Human Development"Hanover, Germany (September 6-8, 2000) A wish Cocoon Along a dusty road in India there sat a beggar who sold cocoons.

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Teaching in Higher Ed Episode: Ungrading with Susan Blum

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Teaching in Higher Ed Episode: Ungrading with Susan Blum

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This conversation with Susan Blum provides an overview of her book:

Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

The book includes chapters from many ungrading experts, including MYFest facilitators Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh and Laura Gibbs.

In the podcast interview, she stresses:

"Think about your students as people who are learning things for purposes. If they are not learning for a grade, why else are they learning?"

https://teachinginhighered.com/350

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 350 of The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Ungrading with Susan Blum.

[music]

[00:00:09] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:18] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students. Joining me for today's episode is Susan D. Blum. She's a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, currently fixated on education and pedagogical praxis. She's the author of "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College, and the editor of their recent volume, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Susan, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:18] Susan Blum: Thanks, it's so great to be here on this illustrious program.

[00:01:22] Bonni: Oh, I'm so glad to just get this chance to talk with you. Not only have I, of course, read your book, but also followed you for quite some time on Twitter. This is such an important series of conversations that are happening right now. I'm excited for us to explore them, but I want to start out way back when to our childhoods and hear as you talk a little bit about what do you remember about grades as either a little girl, or when you got to junior high, high school? What do you remember about grades, and what they did or didn't do for you?

[00:01:55] Susan: I loved grades. I got good grades. I was this perfect good girl student. The grades were affirmation that I was good and smart, and following the rules, which I didn't always do completely. I was a procrastinator. Sometimes I didn't know exactly, I had these recollections of like, history class. I didn't really understand what was happening in there. I was really good at test taking, and I love taking tests, and school was a perfect fit for me. Where I've ended up is kind of funny, because I kind of reject all of that right now. I've had quite a journey over my many decades of living with school as a student and a teacher, and also a parent. Whatever that's worth.

[00:02:50] Bonni: When I think back to my own childhood, I think back to having a growth mindset, but not utilizing this feeling that I got good. I don't even remember grades, kindergarten, third grade, I don't remember them. When I start to remember something about grades, and also academics would be around high school. I felt like I could have continued on that, they call it gate, the gifted program. I know that that's a whole, lots of challenges with that area of our education here at least in the United States. I remember, like I felt like I could have done that. That seemed really hard, and didn't have a big payoff for me.

I didn't understand really, I think the choices I was making. I went what I considered to be the easier route and didn't care a lot about grades. I didn't really care a lot about grades even by the time I got to college, but boy, oh boy do I remember in my master's program, I don't know what happened to me, but I was going to get perfect A's. I'm here to tell you today that I got perfect A's except for one A minus, and I'm still mad about it.

It's interesting how it kind of evolves like that. I don't think I really thought as critically. I shouldn't say I don't think I'm sure I did not think as critically about grades as I should have once I was in a position to "give them to people", which the way I'm phrasing that, of course has its challenges too. What do you remember about- because at some point you have to realize, wait, everyone doesn't have the same relationship I do with grades. Everyone's not the perfect test taker. It's not always because they don't want to be.

I think a lot of times we ascribe merit to these things, that you've got that bad grade because you're a bad person or you're bad at whatever, like it's a choice thing. Where do you remember in your career starting to go, "Wait, there's a big difference here."

[00:04:49] Susan: Well, I certainly knew people who I knew were very capable, and thoughtful, and interesting, and creative people who didn't get good grades or perfect grades in school. I always thought there was some- I'm sort of humiliated to be saying this, but I'm saying it out loud, because I think it's important for your listeners to understand that there's a journey, and that if they have not questioned grades at all, they're in really good company. I didn't question the objectivity and value of grades until well into my teaching career, which is shocking to me right now. It's like I had this complete epiphany and revelation and transformation.

Now, I know that I used to think that but I think so completely differently that it's hard to feel like the same person feeling those things. My real transformation in terms of how I think about grades came when I was doing my book on plagiarism. I wrote a book called My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture. I really began by thinking that grade inflation was a problem and that students' cheating was a problem. I ended up thinking that grades were the problem, and not the students, and not their production, and not their work ethic. The whole way we framed everything because, by that point, I was reading about learning in a really serious way.

I discovered Alfie Kohn, who literally changed my life. When I started to read about motivation, and I started to see how the rewards themselves were as he says punishment, I completely flipped the way I thought about all of it. Now here I am, like 15 years later, and I have a completely different attitude toward all of it. Grades are, in some way, that kind of linchpin in the whole transformation I personally have had in how I think about learning school, what we're doing here in higher ed, my role as a teacher, what the students are supposed to be doing. All of it is connected, but you have to really question grades or you're not going to get to what I see as the right outcome.

[00:07:25] Bonni: Alfie's name comes up quite a bit in the literature and of course in other people's discourse around this. I just hear his name in many aspects. Tell us more about what he means when he says rewards are the punishments. Tell us more about that.

[00:07:43] Susan: If you think that you have to give people extrinsic rewards for behavior that would otherwise be meaningful, then you are basically telling people that they shouldn't trust themselves, they should always be waiting for external validation, external control. The end of his book has a whole detailed analysis of behaviorism and why that is not the right model we should have for the relationship between students and teachers. Even if you are getting good grades, you're always threatened by the next bad grade, and you're always missing an opportunity to focus on what you're learning for its own sake.

[00:08:34] Bonni: Do you have a recollection of a time in your life, your education, where you saw yourself doing that performance, or the behaviorism?

[00:08:44] Susan: No, because I was made for school. School was made for me. I loved everything about it. I loved math, and I loved science, and I loved foreign languages, and I loved literature, and I loved everything except gym class. I felt great joy in learning everything. If it was hard, that was okay. For me, it was fun. I understand that not everybody's like me. I've watched students over the years, and in some ways the more highly achieving students do this more, do things for performance for achievement, for pleasing the teacher. If you say three responses, I'll give three responses. If you say one response, I'll give one response.

All of that is simply a matter of keeping an eye on the points and making sure you get the points. To my mind, genuine education isn't simply this kind of points game.

[00:09:55] Bonni: I started doing this. I've done it many times, but I'm just recreating it for virtual environment, there's a company called Human Synergistics. They've been publishing for decades a very simple case that's built around the way that institutional review boards make their decisions about medical research, what would be more permissible versus less permissible with their three guiding principles. We do it in a non-medical, non-research class. It's a business ethics class, but it helps to introduce some vocabulary around ethics.

As I was introducing it, I was having to explain to them that you're going to get points for doing this. Like there's a place in the gradebook for points. Just by doing it, you're going to get the points. There's this tension where we're just trained, we're ingrained that there's a right answer here, and what she's looking for is this right answer. I'm going, no, actually, this whole experience of you just saying, what do you think? I don't need you to be a medical researcher and practice probably better if you're not, because then you'd be able to come into it with more of a beginner's mind and thinking about ethics from more of a beginner's mind.

I really had to spend a lot of time helping because this is a new class, and we're all just getting to know each other here. Why would they trust me that there's not something about the performance that they're about to do that I'm going to trick them and be like, two points off, or whatever? I am one who is not fully embraced ungrading. I'm so glad to learn from people like you, you used the word journey a few moments ago. This isn't something that I think would be wise to just jump wholeheartedly. We don't have to be perfect in terms of that you can incorporate many aspects of it.

Then it does, of course, require transparency, this is how this is structured, then this will be rated using the following criteria. I tried to get a little bit closer to maybe specifications grading, although I don't know if that's the best representation, but we can start to hear from people like you. Then that's where I'd like to head next with what were grades designed to do, versus what they are actually doing.

Could you talk a little bit about what many of us, myself included, just learned without realizing we were learning like this, this is it. This is why we do this. This is why it's so important. Then that tires screeching moment where you go, but it's not doing that. Here's all the other stuff that it's doing, that is really detrimental?

[00:12:36] Susan: I just want to piggyback on something you said a moment ago about students thinking you're tricking them. Because when I first began ungrading, I had the sense that students thought I was tricking them. I had to learn how to really explain what I'm doing and build trust in the class, in each other, in what we're doing in the enterprise, so that they can see that I really know what I'm doing in removing this thing that everybody thinks is actually the central part of the enterprise.

I wrote this other book called, I Love Learning; I Hate School. There was a chapter in there about grades. It's based on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews done with undergraduates. You ask them what the point is of college, and they say, "To get good grades." People believe that grades are important. I think people think they're important for three reasons. One is for sorting, so we can tell who's good and who's bad, or who's most good, and who's least good, for communicating, for feedback, or whatever, and for motivating. It falls flat on all three points, and then it also has bad effects, in addition to not producing the good effects that we hope.

We know that when you focus on extrinsic motivation, you reduce or even sometimes destroy intrinsic motivation. If you have to bribe somebody to do something, then it must be because they don't want to do it for itself. If you tell somebody, "Eat this peach, it's really delicious." Eating the peach is its own reward. If you say to somebody, "Eat this peach and you get five points," they'll think, "I guess there's something wrong with the peach so that they have to give me the points." There's research for decades and decades, a hundred years, showing that extrinsic motives don't really work. They're not necessary if you have meaningful activities.

If the learning is interesting, people will do it. Some of my happiest teaching moments are when a student says, "Wow, this was so interesting, I forgot it was for school." I think, "Okay, that's all I need." I could die happy. We think that grades are necessary for communicating or feedback. For a hundred years, people have shown that grades are completely inconsistent, different faculty, teachers, K through 12, in higher ed, include different dimensions in their grading schemes.

Some include participation, some don't. Some include attendance, some don't. Some include all the quizzes, some let you drop some. Some include improvement, some don't. Some include engagement, some fuzzy sense of that. Faculty are completely inconsistent. We also know that when students get a grade on an assignment, they only pay attention to the grade, even if there's feedback, written feedback, they tend to disregard that feedback, because they see it and faculty see it as only there to justify the grade. We're not actually producing much feedback anyway, we believe that grades are necessary for sorting in a kind of myth of meritocracy.

We know from all kinds of research in terms of equity, in terms of how advantaged people are going into things, that grades basically track with advantage at every level of school, everywhere. I don't see my own role as reproducing prior sorts, I see my role as trying to help every student get somewhere, and they may be going to different places. Those are the three things that grades are supposed to do that they don't do very well. Then we know, there's so much research showing that grades lead to things like cheating and plagiarizing, because the incentive structure is there.

Grades lead to gaming the system, they lead to doing the minimum, to doing superficial work, to dependence on a teacher, dependence on the judge, what do you want? Is this right? They lead to a false sense of completion, now you're done. As a writer, am I a perfect writer? When do I get to be the perfect writer? I don't know. Then finally, all I'll say for today is that, grades also lead to a huge amount of anxiety. In some cases, anxiety, so severe that people are depressed, and it leads to suicide. That, to me, is the most impossible and unthinkable outcome of this whole system.

[00:18:01] Bonni: I think sometimes it's hard for people to take this in, because sometimes there's just so much cognitive dissonance. It can feel like, "Wow, all of this is true, but this has been true forever." Or, "Maybe I don't buy into everything, but some of this is true," to start to wrestle with some of this stuff. I know you've collaborated with, shared with so many people around this. Do you have a guide for us as we start to go, "Wow, some of what she's saying might be true. Oh, I'm recognizing some of that in myself and also, in students that I have had in classes."

To what extent do we need more information reading a book on? It would be great, which is why you're here today. To what extent could we start small? Again, I don't want to give you a binary choice. I just love your thoughts on, as you've seen people begin to be confronted with the same things that you and I have been confronted with in our teaching, and so many others. Start small experiment, or go out and get more information or give me a third choice? I'm not thinking, blend the two.

[00:19:12] Susan: I think starting small, is probably necessary. You can't just do everything you've always done and get rid of grades through and through. You have to really think about your goals, and not only your goals, but the students' goals. Think about your students as actual people and people who are learning things for purposes. If they're not learning for a grade, why else are they learning? What are they getting out of this particular thing? The more fascinating you can make it, the more you can appeal to students' innate curiosity, which we all have. It is part of our nature. It's part of our being as mammals, not just humans.

All humans, all animals are curious, and we all love our subjects, and we are deeply passionate and curious about them. Why can't we join our students on these kinds of adventures, to discover, "Wow, anthropology, it's everywhere." If you show students that their life can be more fascinating by learning what you're doing together, you don't have to grade everything. You can also have authentic outcomes so that the students do something with what they're learning, they tell their classmate whom they like, or they tell their partner, or they tell their roommate, or they apply it to something.

Those are genuine outcomes, and when you do that, they can be small things, "Go interview your grandmother and ask her this." You don't have to grade that because your student will be so inspired, and the grandmother's feedback will be reward. Then, grades aren't necessary. It does mean rethinking assignments, it does mean you're not going to necessarily get people to read something really boring, so maybe don't assign something really boring, unless you help students find a reason for their own purposes, for that to be useful.

It does mean rethinking a lot of things, but you can rethink small things, and then get your confidence, and then see that it actually has good outcomes. Talk to your students, ask them what they think. Ask them what they feel. Once you actually have an honest conversation with your students, I don't think it's hard to get rid of grades all the way.

[00:22:04] Bonni: I'd like to share one other example from my class and then get your response to it because I have been so inspired by your work and it's so rewarding to just know I'm not done but to have already felt really good about the progress. You were mentioning about thinking about your goals. What's the purpose for why someone would learn this? I decided in this business ethics class, one thing I wanted to change pretty dramatically, at least it felt dramatic to me. Picture this, 2020 spring, I was teaching a business ethics class, and I always would do this business ethics in the news.

I'd give this sticky note to everybody as they came in, they would write down what's the story they saw in the news that came up since we last met. We put them all on the back wall and then we sort them. As you already know, well, the story is going because there would be the first week one business news story about some economic effects of something potential, coronavirus, whatever, and then the next week, and the next week, and before you know it, every sticky note was about the coronavirus. Of course, we didn't meet together after that, but I started to see some real misinformation that they were coming into contact with.

I had spent so much time thinking, "I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough about this if I can't do it," and I was like, "Get over yourself. You cannot have students bring news stories if you're not going to at least attempt to equip them with this stuff." You might be familiar with Mike Caulfield's work. He is an expert in misinformation. He has a framework called the SIFT model, and the whole thing about it is any of us can do this stuff. I did have that feeling like, "Wow. Well, this is something I'm feeling increasingly passionate about, but how do I get them to be interested in it?" I had a couple of exercises that were just you did it or you didn't do it?

That was all I was looking for. I had them answer some questions like where do you get your news from? How do you feel about that? What would you change, if anything, about the way that you get your news and all of that? All of them, except one of them, had something they'd like to change? I thought, "Well, here we go," because I couldn't have and they all felt very different. I haven't done even a simple analysis of them yet, but it's all still fresh, but everyone coming in with some innate desire to change something about their current methodology. I suspect that as we go, they might even feel even more of an increase, I hope. I definitely feel it.

I have an increasing desire to learn more about this. I pictured this potentially being something they'll carry with them for many, many years to come until it all changes again. Anyway, I wanted to share that with you in terms of the kind of reflection that you're talking about, that curiosity. I'm sure you've run across times where people really struggle with, "I don't know how to get people curious about this," or that perhaps are not self-aware enough to know that in their discipline because they're just so steeped in it that it's hard for them to think with that beginner's mind?

Do you have any guidance for us in terms of thinking about the goals to get outside of ourselves and back into our students potentially?

[00:25:20] Susan: Well, I now begin most all my courses asking students to generate their own goals, and to see how this class might fit into their lives. It might even be a required course. In addition to checking the box for the major or something, what else can you do from this? I have a lot of student voices and I asked students to do a lot of connecting between what we're doing in class and what they are living. Even if students take five courses a year, that's 40 courses over four years of college, they can't learn everything. We can't teach them everything in 1 semester, in 20 semesters, in 30 semesters.

What we have to figure out is, what are the dispositions that will help them learn going forward once school is over? I don't just mean for their first job because their first job will not be their last job in almost every case. What kinds of experiences are students going to have in our classes, whether it's critical information literacy, or whether it's ethnographic observation, or whether it's asking questions about ethics, or whatever it is? Having that experience of the power of this insight is something that I think we can help foster if we have interesting enough activities.

It might mean rethinking textbooks, and tests, and quizzes, and things like that, you can get to the same outcomes in a lot of different ways. I think trying to imagine what the students are actually engaged in, what does this feel like for the student to be doing, what are they reading, what are they hearing, what are they writing, what are they studying, what are they learning, what are they talking to other people about, and really trying to figure out ways that this could be meaningful in a multiplicity of ways.

Universal Design for Learning is something that has so many facets, and that can include people having different goals. Some of your students might end up going into business, and others might end up being teachers. How can all of these different future paths be enriched by whatever they're doing in your class?

[00:28:03] Bonni: It's so true. I got such a kick out of some of the less traditional disciplines that might sign up for ungrading showing up in your book, including I really enjoyed that, I need to go reread it again, the chapter with someone who teaches computer programming. I suspect you probably just got so tickled reading this chapter when you first started in because I'm thinking about your work in plagiarism, and cheating, and all of that, and programming, there's a lot of challenges that would show up that just how easy it would be to copy-paste in all of those things.

You could think about fighting that with fire or you could think about that's what we create with our system of grading, and if it doesn't go away, then you're not going to be able to tap into that. Then, the other one, of course, I got which I've had a chance to interview a couple of times for this podcast, but who teaches in STEM fields biology, I believe, forgive me if I'm getting it wrong. Just before we close this portion of the show, would you give any advice to people who are feeling a little resistance like, "This is all well and fine, but it doesn't work with my discipline because it is so test-oriented or it is so traditionally-minded when it comes to measures?"

[00:29:19] Susan: Right. You're talking about Rissa Sorensen-Unruh who teaches organic chemistry-

[00:29:25] Bonni: Yes. Thank you.

[00:29:27] Susan: -and Chris Riesbeck. They teach it very different institutions in very different disciplines, but many people have done versions of ungrading in all different disciplines. I don't have time to talk about all the research on physics education, and chemistry education, and math education, but a lot of people have really tried to capitalize on active learning techniques, on involvement, on curiosity. Derek Bruff talks about, time for telling. You don't lecture, lecture, lecture until the students are stupefied and then ask them to do something meaningful, you give them some puzzle or something that makes them curious, and then they have to work it through. At which point they might end up having to take a test, but the way they get there is a very different model.

[00:30:23] Bonni: Yes, and even when you're talking about taking a test because that is some of the challenges that some colleagues of mine will share, we can give lots and lots of low stakes, no stakes practice tests because we've agreed that wouldn't it be great if you could get into medical school or wouldn't it be great if you could achieve, so there are still going to be boxes that our students need to check in order to attain some goal. Is it a master's program, whatever? It's not like that's going to go away, but that's true.

[00:30:54] Susan: Sadly, that's true.

[00:30:56] Bonni: Well, maybe I shouldn't even say that because I am pretty amazed at how quickly so much has changed around standardized testing. I'm embarrassed to admit, I have no idea if this is happening in other places, but almost as soon as the words are out of my mouth, of course, it has to be recharged sometimes behind on these things, but that happened pretty quick.

It took a pandemic to really dislodge it, but so maybe I shouldn't be so confident at that, but at any rate, if that's what your job is to prepare someone to take some type of a standardized test, that doesn't mean you have to create the same conditions of that to help foster the learning and can we lessen that anxiety now?

[00:31:41] Susan: Well, and we know that when students learn for a test, they often forget it really fast. If we can deepen their learning, then they're much more likely to have good outcomes on tests and I don't want to take too long because I know we have some time limit. Like in Finland, they don't take a lot of tests in school at all. They don't have homework, they don't have tests, they play outside, they don't teach reading until they're older and they do really, really well on international tests.

There are lots of reasons Finland is small, is wealthy, is homogeneous. There are lots of other factors, but just because someday there's going to be some big standardized test doesn't mean all of life up to that moment has to be fixated on these inhumane and ineffective learning experiences.

[00:32:35] Bonni: Yes, and what I know, you're not saying, but just because I have another episode, that'll be right around the time that this one airs and where neither of us is saying that memorization is an important, in fact, it can really deepen learning. In many of our disciplines, that's a critical thing, but does the memorization have to come with that? Does it have to be coupled with these high anxiety, high stakes things? I think in terms of plagiarism and cheating and all of that, I had an opportunity to speak with James Lang who's also written a book about cheating and that's one of the things I take away from that conversation, which was five or six years ago, as wild as that is.

I think I was under the impression of like, "Well, we throw that out too, and no, no, no, we don't throw that out." That stays in here as a very important aspect of learning. It's just how we're trying to get people to memorize things, that's the problem.

[00:33:26] Susan: Yes, we could keep going about that.

[00:33:29] Bonni: No, please, please just respond because I'd love to hear it, and then we can get ourselves over to that recommendation.

[00:33:33] Susan: Well, I think the main thing I would like to encourage everybody to remember is that the goal is learning and learning can be for the purpose of use or interest. Those are really good motivating reasons. If you have to memorize the abbreviations for the elements or something like that. When students really understand that it's so that you can do these other things and we can make it fun and it might be hard, but we can do it, then it's much more likely that it will stick.

We know a lot about how people learn about retrieval effects and memorization and practice and all of that, but also it's true that you can learn a random string of facts more easily when they're embedded in meaningful context. Rather than just have a stack of flashcards, it's what you might also need to do. I studied Chinese and so Chinese characters, I had to learn with flashcards, but reading, writing, using, speaking, flipping them up and remembering, all of that is necessary, but also seeing them in context, not just having one very simple quiz after another is I think important to remember.

[00:35:03] Bonni: I'm so glad that I asked you to expound on that and also that you were willing to because you just gave me the perfect segue into what I didn't realize I'd be recommending today. I want to extend actually something that you just said, and I've shared on prior episodes that Alzheimer's runs in my family and so I have a close relative who we both worry together about that is that going to happen. Anyway, we were talking on the phone the other day and she was mentioning that she read, there was a book someone came out with recently about keeping your brain healthy.

She's learned a number of languages in her life so she was picking up another one and I can't even remember what the new one was that she was picking up, but I had this realization and that was as I was speaking with her because I have always wished that I had learned another language, specifically, Spanish is one that I really regret. I took a class in high school and just never got very far with and I kept always thinking like, "Well, I could never learn it fluently unless I immersed myself and so it's not worth doing."

In that moment, I thought, "You know what? What would be wrong with learning a little bit more Spanish than you can remember from college? What would be wrong with you using the same app that she's been using and you could talk about it and you could ask how she's doing with hers," but I don't know why I decided with language that it's an all or nothing thing and I haven't quite figured out and I'd be interested if you have any thoughts on this, but there has to be benefits that would come without me learning all Spanish to be able to speak and write fluently.

[00:36:38] Susan: Okay. Well, one of my other hats as a linguistic anthropologist and so yes, there isn't an all or nothing mastery, but I know why you think that it's because of school. It's because you either get an A in Spanish and are perfect or you might as well give up and real life isn't like that. Many people can communicate really well with what might not be seen as perfect standard Spanish and what is the harm in trying? What is the harm in demonstrating goodwill to Spanish speakers by trying to meet them partway?

I'm not even talking about the cognitive benefits of learning something new, but you should try to learn Spanish imperfectly. Learning imperfectly is a very good human goal for a lot of what we do in our lives.

[00:37:36] Bonni: That's what I'm going to put for my recommendation. Try to learn something new imperfectly. The other thing I'd like to share, I know that there are a lot of apps and that any app or service, they're all going to have their limitations in that, so I have not done extensive review. I did decide to use the same one that she's using, so I'm having a ball with it. That was called Duolingo. Again, for example, it asks me to speak a phrase and I'm sure it's not perfectly capturing if I'm saying it right, but it's better than nothing. I've been enjoying it, so I'll share that too if anyone wants to just dip it.

It's been free so far that they do regularly try to get me to subscribe, but I just click no, thanks and I've just been having fun for about it takes five minutes a day, and I've been doing that most days and it's been great. I'm going to pass it over to you now for your recommendations and, Susan, thank you so much for that encouragement. I just love the way you framed that.

[00:38:31] Susan: Great. Well, I've been using Duolingo for Spanish also, but I love languages. I've learned a number of them over my years, and I have reservations about Duolingo, but I'm using it anyway and I have actually paid for the premium version because I'm susceptible to that kind of pressure.

[00:38:50] Bonni: I may be too.

[00:38:51] Susan: My first recommendation-

[00:38:52] Bonni: We'll see what happens to me in a few weeks.

[00:38:55] Susan: I've been doing it for years. My first recommendation is Jill Biden's coat. Dr. Jill Biden at the presidential inauguration was wearing a spectacularly beautiful coat and in it, there was embroidery and the embroidery was of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin in which he said, "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." I think that's right and I think it's amazing that Jill Biden is so committed to her role as an educator, that she had that embroidered into this historic quote. I have another recommendation. I don't know how many I get.

[00:39:45] Bonni: I'm riveted.

[laughter]

[00:39:48] Susan: Okay, I'm going to limit it to four.

[00:39:50] Bonni: I love it.

[00:39:52] Susan: One is a book called Insomnia which is by Marina Benjamin and it's got a really beautiful purple cover. I read it when I had insomnia. It's a beautiful book. It's beautifully written. It's got some research and some personal experience. The third thing I want to recommend is a book called Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, it's by Kirschenbaum, Napier, and Simon. The 50th-anniversary edition is being published next month with the effort of Barry Fishman, who is at the University of Michigan. He says the astonishing thing is that basically everything they wrote 50 years ago is still true, and we need to read this.

Then the fourth recommendation, and I will stop with this one is Peter Elbows book, Writing Without Teachers, which was recommended to me by my dear colleague, Kate Pantelides, and I am so inspired by Peter Elbow's book and a lot of the other people writing about writing.

[00:41:07] Bonni: I've heard great things about Peter Elbows over the years. That sounds like so good. All these are so great. How did you know about the embroidery?

[00:41:16] Susan: I don't have any idea. It was somewhere.

[00:41:20] Bonni: I'm going to have to go back and check out what she was wearing and see if I can find that quote in there. That's great. This is so fun. It's been such a joy to get to talk to you. I know we worked on scheduling this together for a while. I've been looking forward to the moment. It was nice to be able to have more of a relaxed read with the book and just soak it in. I read it a little slower than I do some of them, and it just what a treasure you've given us.

[00:41:45] Susan: Thank you for inviting me. Obviously, we could keep going for a reason all the time. [laughing] It's really very thought-provoking to commit to talk with you. I look forward to listening to the next episodes on your podcasts.

[00:41:59] Bonni: Oh, great. Thank you so much.

[00:42:01] Susan: Thanks.

[music]

[00:42:05] Bonni: Thanks once again to Susan Blum for being a guest on today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks to all of you for listening. I recently updated the way that I do my now weekly I can say it now weekly updates. If you haven't subscribed yet, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, you'll always get an overview of the most recent episode, and you'll also receive a look at some resources and other relevant episodes. Lots of people are giving me good feedback that the new format works. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and thanks once again for listening. I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.
[00:43:05] [END OF AUDIO] The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Ungrading, with Susan Blum - Teaching in Higher Ed

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00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 350 of The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Ungrading with Susan Blum. [music] [00:00:09] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. [00:00:18] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed.

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Alternative Approaches to Grading (a conversation with ~8 educators)

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Alternative Approaches to Grading (a conversation with ~8 educators)

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It's kind of coincidental that Rissa's photo is what comes up here! There were maybe 7 others involved :)

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Alternative Approaches to Grading - OneHE

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Watch the video above for practical tips, or check out the resources for several different alternative approaches. Arley Cruthers' infographics are a good visual introduction; the podcast with Jesse Stommel, Asao Inoue and Maha Bali is a good auditory intro; and the blogposts by Jesse Stommel, Alfie Kohn and Munir Fasheh are a good starting point.

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From Bob on importance of learning self-assessment (Sadler)

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From Bob on importance of learning self-assessment (Sadler)

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DOI link for Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal

Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal book

DOI link for Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal

Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal book

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Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal |

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DOI link for Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal book DOI link for Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal book

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This book represents the crowdsourced wisdom, reflections, failures, and triumphs of those educators exploring ungrading in their courses, at their institutions, and within their communities of practice. It contains contributions of all sizes, genres, and experiences. Whatever is honest and authentic about doing ungrading. Hopefully, you have come to this book with a deep interest in the ungrading phenomenon, especially as it relates to teaching during a global pandemic. More importantly, and regardless of any pandemic, it is assumed that the reading audience of this book is invested in a pedagogy of empathy, an approach that trusts students first and foremost. When the investment involves our students, nothing else compares.

There has been NO revision, evaluation, or judgment of the contributions herein; whatever has been sent to me has been published. Since the ungrading journey is an open and shared one, it is essential that this crowdsourced collection be #open, created as an Open Education Resource (#OER) in accordance with open pedagogy and Open Educational Practices (#OEP). Take what you want, as long as you attribute the writer/composer whenever you retain, revise, remix, reuse, or redistribute (the 5 R's of open content). In short, this book is free, open, and exposed in the wild. It will be organized by the emerging themes/sections/genres from the contributions as they come in. It is a living collection that will undergo continual updating and change. Much like our teaching!

One important part of this text is that it supports user annotation (and commenting) via Hypothes.is. We can use this tool to share our annotations and engage with one another as we read/respond/reflect upon the various contributions in this text. According to Remi Kalir, "[A]nnotation is a collaborative activity that can contribute to social connectedness and online community-building" ( Annotate Your Syllabus 3.0). We can become knowledge producers as we make our thinking visible via social annotation.

Do you know what's interesting? When you type the word ungrading, it usually gets autocorrected to upgrading. This book will claim ownership over both terms - when we ungrade, we invariably upgrade our students' learning!

-David Buck, Professor of English

Howard Community College (Columbia, MD)

dbuck@howardcc.edu / @dbuckedu

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This book represents the crowdsourced wisdom, reflections, failures, and triumphs of those educators exploring ungrading in their courses, at their institutions, and within their communities of practice. It contains contributions of all sizes, genres, and experiences. Whatever is honest and authentic about doing ungrading. Hopefully, you have come to this book with a deep interest in the ungrading phenomenon, especially as it relates to teaching during a global pandemic. More importantly, and regardless of any pandemic, it is assumed that the reading audience of this book is invested in a pedagogy of empathy, an approach that trusts students first and foremost. When the investment involves our students, nothing else compares.

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Literature professor Elisabeth Gruner and science professor Heather Miceli describe their practice of "ungrading," a feedback tool that has drawn attention and increasing support.

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to grade or not to grade? "ungrading" in higher education

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‎The Mortarboard: To Grade or Not To Grade? "Ungrading" in higher education on Apple Podcasts

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Literature professor Elisabeth Gruner and science professor Heather Miceli describe their practice of "ungrading," a feedback tool that has drawn attention and increasing support.

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In episode 89 of the Lecture Breakers podcast, Dr. Chris Jones and Dr. Heather Miceli join us to talk about ungrading in higher education.

In this two-part episode, Chris and Heather bring us very different perspectives. Chris brings us the perspective of both a faculty member and a de facto program administrator. And, he just completed his first semester using the ungrading approach.

Heather brings us the perspective of being an adjunct professor teaching introductory science courses. And she has been using the ungrading approach for awhile.

In part 1 of this conversation, Chris and Heather talk about what ungrading is and how they implement this approach in their courses. They also discuss some common misconceptions about ungrading.

In part 2 (episode 90), they share how they introduce students to ungrading, how they are overcoming some of the challenges of ungrading, and how they are making assessment and feedback work within the ungrading model.

Favorite quotes:
"There's no one way to ungrade."

"Most grading is actively harmful. It doesn't reflect student learning."

"Ungrading gives students so much more space to play to their strengths"
Show Notes:

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Episode 89: Let's Talk about Ungrading (Part 1) with Dr. Chris Jones and Dr. Heather Miceli

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In episode 89 of the Lecture Breakers podcast, Dr. Chris Jones and Dr. Heather Miceli join us to talk about ungrading in higher education. In part 1 of our conversation, they discuss what ungrading is and how they implement this approach in their courses. And they discuss some common misconceptions about ungrading.

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Informational Slides!

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https://www.bobvanvliet.com/notes/reflections-of-a-first-time-ungrader/

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I just ran my first ungraded course. Obviously, I did it all wrong. Nonetheless, it was wonderful. I've never had better conversations with students about what they take away from a course.

In this post, I want to write down some first rough thoughts before the experience fades, also in preparation for the Ungrading as Emancipation track at MYFest.

About the course

KT2700 'Designing Medical Technology' is an introductory design course in the 2nd year of the 'Clinical Technology' BSc programme at Delft University of Technology. It's a group project, with 90 students in 18 groups of 5. There's clinical and technical experts that come by for one-time meetings with each group, but I mostly teach this course by myself. The course runs for 7 weeks, with three 4-hour afternoons of class time each week.

Students choose a problem to work on, do problem analysis, develop concepts, practice drawing, and conduct a simple empirical validation of their design.

My approach to ungrading

As this was my first real course-wide ungrading attempt, I wanted to play it semi-safe and use a common, tried and tested model. In essence, this meant I replaced my assessment of the final report with a self-assessment by each group, that we discussed in a final 20 minute meeting. I did what Jesse Stommel does and told my students that although I reserve the right to change a grade, I fully intended to follow their proposals. (And in the end, I really did not change anyone's self-determined grade.)

This course already contained a number of rounds of peer feedback on intermediate results. This year I added a kick-off workshop in which I asked students what they hoped to get out of the course, and what their personal challenges and goals were. I also added a (very light-weight and informal) mid-course reflection that asked students to think about how the course was going and what they were learning.

So, what did I learn?

1. First, nothing changed

I expected revolution from day one. I was super excited to blow my students' minds in the introductory lecture with how they'd determine their own grades. Education as the practice of freedom! Equity! Rainbows and unicorns!

Yeah, not so much. The first few weeks, nothing changed. The course felt very similar to previous years. At week 5 or so, I was feeling decidedly disappointed.

Looking back, my expectations were pretty naïeve, of course. These students are so used to just doing what they're told, getting the grade, and moving on. It was foolish to think that students can go from paint-by-numbers to full autonomy in a few short weeks.

I also realized that teacher-assigned grades are not the only thing that determines the overall character of a course. (No shit, Sherlock.) The structure I set up, with frequent peer-review assignments and deadlines, including review questions that gave the impression that there were 'right' or 'correct' ways of doing things, worked against a culture of freedom, exploration, and self-direction. I also have a lot to learn in how I respond to student questions that assume or look for a single right answer. I'm not yet so good at responding to those in a way that ignores or challenges those assumptions.

In other words, students just did the work as usual. And they still asked a lot of questions in the category 'How do you want us to do it?' instead of feeling free to decide for themselves. They asked to be told what to do and they did what they were told. Just like in previous years.

2. Then, everything changed

Ungrading really is transformative. Even though the students were behaving as usual in those first weeks of the course, for me my relationship with them felt completely different from the get-go. And the way the course ended transformed the experience for students as well.

Throughout the course, I felt a lot better about the way I was coaching students. Previously, I was pushing them to take risks, knowing that it might lead to output that I had to rank lower than it could have been ranked if they took the safe approach. That felt massively unfair. As betrayal, almost. And that feeling was completely gone. Even if the students were still a bit too focused on doing it right, and according to my standards, I was much more free and able to direct their attention to what they were actually learning, and to prioritize learning experiences over polished results in how I advised them.

And then I sat down to read the group self-assessments and individual reflections. Oh, boy. So much good stuff. Responding to a very general prompt, many students pointed out the exact things I would list as the core lessons for this course. And many students described learning experiences that started with apprehension, worry, or expecting not to be interested, moving through initial surprises and a growing sense of skill and comprehension, to outright enthusiasm, pride, and consequences for how they saw their future after graduating from the programme.

And then, I sat down to talk with them about all this. Those two afternoons of final meetings were some of the best conversations I've ever had with students. A lot of students mentioned how they rarely think about what they'd learned so effectively either. "Usually, when you hand in a report you hope to never have to see it again," one student said. "But the way we discussed our end-results with other groups this time, and looking back at what we delivered together, was really fun and valuable."

I've had final meetings after the end of a project in other courses. But those were mostly me explaining and justifying a grade. Those did not feel like conversations between equals. But these were real, open discussions.

3. Self-grading is still grading

In those final meetings I had with student groups about their reflection and self-assessment, many students explained their grade in comparative terms. They were still ranking. A few also asked me - after I'd written down their self-determined grade - whether it matched what I would have given them. They wanted to know wheter the grade was 'correct'. I told them I have no clue what a 'correct' grade is anymore.

Most students didn"t really know how to translate their assessment of what they'd learned and accomplished (or not) into a single number. At the time, I felt a bit guilty for not giving them more guidance. Later I realized that this was the whole reason for not wanting to grade them in the first place: it's impossible to distill a multidimensional set of qualitative judgements into one unidimensional number.

I don't know yet whether my conclusion from this is that next time I want to go with a pass/fail model, or that I should accept this cognitive dissonance because the attempt to come up with the 'right' grade does seem to serve as an effective means of stimulating evaluative reflection and in-depth comparison with others' work.

Side-note: the Dunning-Kruger effect

In general the level of grades was half a point higher than in previous years (the average rose from 7.8 to 8.3). That effect was less strong than I'd expected. And in any case, I really don't care. The students did great work and learned lots. Who cares about the numbers?

But I also got the strong sense that there had been a reversal at the top end. Many of the self-given 8/10s would have been 9/10s if I had done the grading, and most 9/10s would have been 8/10s.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.

So yeah. That seems to be relevant for self-grading . At least in the context of projects, where it's not a question of self-assessing correctness on something like exam questions, but an overall, holistic judgement of open-ended work.

4. Self assessment in groups can be problematic

One of the bigger 'Oh, crap!'-moments in this course was when I realized that I was putting students in a difficult situation with self-grading as a group. I don't think I ever read anything ungrading in group projects, where students have to come up with a grade proposal together as a team. In groups that didn't get along so well, this led to issues. And even in groups that worked well together, it could lead to friction.

In one case, this led (almost) to a tragic situation with a student who'd had some issues with the group work because of his autism, but also learned a ton by working through those issues (and taught me something in the process, which I wrote about elsewhere), that still wanted to grade himself lower than the other group members because he had 'contributed less'. Luckily I didn't need to step in. Another member of his team would't let him be that unfair to himself. (Students are awesome.)

5. It's the reflection, stupid!

Earlier, I wrote:

We want our students to learn to evaluate their own work critically. The best way to do this is by practising evaluating their own work. But it is difficult to have students do this honestly when it is ultimately our evaluation that counts.
Me, in a column on ungrading for the Delta, TU Delft's 'journalistic platform', informed by the work of D Royce Sadler.

When we grade our students, we take one of the most important acts of learning away from our students by doing it for them: practicing judgement. Even in its most basic, mistake-laden form (i.e. what I did in this course), ungrading makes students actually responsible for their own learning by putting the final say in their hands.

If, whatever happens during a course, in the end it's our decisions that count, then what reason do students have to really think about the quality of their work? Why reflect seriously if the outcome of that reflection doesn't matter, and it's someone else's judgement and only that other's judgement that matters? If someone else is going to tell you what the conclusion of your own reflection should have been?

Ungrading breaks that power structure. It breaks that adversarial relationship. It emancipates. Education as the practice of freedom. Rainbows and unicorns, after all.

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I just ran my first ungraded course. Obviously, I did it all wrong. Nonetheless, it was wonderful. I've never had better conversations with students about what they take away from a course.

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Where Does Grading Come From? by Asao B. Inoue

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Where Does Grading Come From? by Asao B. Inoue

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An excellent blog post on the history of grades, grading systems, and the sorting/valuing/classifying of people. It's also linked in Rissa's informational slides from Ungrading Session 1 (Jun 17)

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This is a series of blogposts meant for students who are in courses using grading contracts of some kind to determine their final course grades, or those who just want to understand better what grades are, what they do in classrooms, and how they effect learning. This is the first post in a series of five blogposts meant to address questions about grading and grading contracts. If you're a teacher (or an inquisitive student), you might look at my Labor-Based Grading Contracts Resources page.

This series is a collaboration with the really awesome podcast, Pedagogue (@_Pedagogue_) with Shane Wood. You can listen to me reading this blogpost or use the widget below. But maybe you just want to read it on your own below, or follow along.

***

Q1. Where does the practice of grading come from and what does that history tell us about today's grading practices in schools?
The Beginnings of Grading
It may seem obvious why we have grades in schools and colleges. They provide a way to tell us how well we're doing in a class or in school more generally. But how well do grades actually explain your learning in your courses? How descriptive are they? How exactly do they help you as a student understand your strengths and weaknesses in any performance, or how you might improve or change things, say in a writing course? How well do grades help you develop a complex practice such as writing or communication? If grades don't offer you good answers to any of these questions, then why do we have them in the first place, and why do some of us think grades do answer these questions?

Grading is a technology. Like all technologies, it has biases built into it. Today, we inherit many of those biases from elite colleges' early uses of grading systems. Perhaps the most dangerous bias in grading is its inherent ranking of people and what that ranking suggests not just about what students have learned in classrooms but their very worth as people in society.

The history of grades, which is not very old, can explain not just where grades come from but why we have them in our educational systems, what we think they do there, and the biases that travel with all grading systems. This history may surprise you, and it suggests that grades are not as useful or meaningful in schools as we often think they are.

Today in schools, standards of language are closely tied to the practice of grading students. In fact, standards and grading are almost synonymous. If you are going to grade people, you need a standard to determine what makes an A, B, C, etc. But grades and their standards are not the same things. Believe it or not, the first instances of grading students didn't use standards as we know them today, ones that are about cognitive skills.

Grading as a practice of ranking students by some judgement of performance comes from elite colleges on the east coast, such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. Their original purpose was never about teaching or marking how much a student learned in a course. Grading represented something else.

For the first several hundred years at Harvard, the first American college, students were ranked by social class standing of their families. This seemed perfectly logical to those who were attending college at that time. Technologies of ranking and grading students, while they didn't always look like what we have today, did intend to rank and categorize groups of students based on social worth or social standing of their families.

Where did this kind of social ranking come from? Those who invented the first grading scales and processes came out of a culture and schools in England that assumed a natural social ranking of people. They took for granted that some students were better than other students because they were born into "better" families. These were vital things to keep track of, they thought, because one's social standing indicated one's privilege, merit, and the future positions and jobs that person would assume as their right and responsibility. In many ways, merit and social standing were synonymous. A grade could indicate these things.

Keep in mind that Harvard was founded in 1636 and opened its doors to students in 1638. Its initial faculty came from Oxford and Cambridge in England. In fact, Harvard College was named after the Cambridge man, John Harvard, who donated his library and some of his land to establish the college.

To learn more about early grading at Harvard and other places, see Mary Lovett Smallwood, An Historical Study of Examinations and Grading Systems in Early American Universities: A Critical Study of the Original Records of Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Mount Holyoke, and Michigan from Their Founding to 1900. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935); and Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner, "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)," CBE-Life Sciences Education, Vol. 13, (Summer 2014), pp. 159-166.

In the same fashion as those English colleges, Harvard was meant to develop the elite young men of colonial New England in order for them to take their places as clergy and government officials. These students were the ones destined by birth to rule the colonies. So ranking students' by social standing was something these early professors were accustomed to since those professors all came from similar elite colleges in England, a country where social class standing was just as, if not more, important than one's economic standing.

All of the grading practices that may have occurred in the first centuries of American higher education are not clearly known. But the first known instance of grading in the ways we do it today may have been in 1785. At that time, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale (seen in the image) created a four category scale that is similar to the A-F scale most schools use now (see also " History of the Modern Grading System"). The Yale scale was based on Latin terms:

Optimi (best)

Second Optimi (second best)

Inferiores (lower)

Perjores (unknown but clearly the lowest)

However, giving students letter or number grades on assignments, or even assigning final course grades, was not something that any college or school did with regularity or consistency until around the end of the 19th century -- that is, just before 1900. And even then, it was not a universal practice.

It wasn't until 1886 that Harvard professors began placing students into five numerical categories, or classes of students: class I, II, III, IV, and V. The first four categories designated some version of passing, while class V identified not passing. But even this simple system appeared to be unnecessary for Harvard professors. By 1895, Harvard moved to an even simpler three category system: "failed," "passed," and "passed with distinction."

In Harvard grade reports sent to parents during the 19th century, students' grades identified the groups of similar students they were in. So a report card would show by subject the class (I, II, III, IV, or V) that the student in question was in. An individual's grades were very much connected to the group of students that the student in question seemed to fit into.

This orientation of gathering students into similarly meritorious groups of students seems to be a carry-over from earlier systems that were based on social class standings. In other words, what seems most important in these early grading systems was to know the group a student fit into. This was supposed to tell you something about the worth and capabilities of all the students in each group.

But why did grading students by their so-called merits become more important by the end of the 19th century? In large part, elite colleges like Harvard and Yale were getting bigger just as the nation was also getting bigger. That is, there were more potential college students, so more students were enrolling or trying to get into colleges. Elite colleges, invested in their social elitism, didn't really want this, or rather, they didn't want certain kinds of people in these elite places.

Grading offered a way to help identify who was acceptable and who was not, even among those accepted into those places. One thing to notice about Harvard's grading, was that most of the grades available were some version of passing, of being okay, proficient. This suggests a bias, and it's not one about being accurate or precise in how much or how well a student knows or learned something. It's a bias about what the grader and college already think of the groups of students they are grading, and what college is meant to provide those groups.

Today, our grading systems still contain many of these old biases. This is why we care about a student's GPA, why we think it says something about their potential to do something else in the future, say succeed in graduate school or do well in a job. But what the early part of the history of grading in colleges shows us is that grading systems started as ranking systems, ranking students not so much by their merit but by their social standing and assumed worth to society. Grading assumes that we can rank everyone along the same scale in any domain of learning and life. Grading is not a natural or neutral practice. It's an artificial and political practice, one that requires the grader to use their standard of things and their judgments of students meeting that standard. Grading may look a little different today, but it contains similar biases as it always has.
Grading to Build A Growing Nation
By the turn of the twentieth century, most U.S. public schools had become compulsory, that is, mandatory. Massachusetts, the state where Harvard sits, was the first to pass compulsory school laws in 1852, but they already had a similar law on the books since 1647, when they were a British colony. That first education law was called, the "Old Deluder Satan Law," and it was mostly about making sure people could read and write in order to read the Bible and not be tricked by the Devil. As the law's opening statement explains, "that old deluder, Satan," might "keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures."

Most states followed Massachusetts' lead. This meant more and more students could qualify to go to college, and more students began going to college, or trying to get in by the end of the 19th century. But from its beginnings in the colonies of America, schools at all levels focused on making good English Christians in a hostile colonial New England, where the Devil lurked everywhere. Perhaps there's no better example of these anxieties, and criticism, of Puritanism in early America as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 short story, " Young Goodman Brown."

By 1900, there were too many students in the existing schools and college systems, systems that were never built for such numbers. Schools were likely getting crowded. Grading those students based on merit came at a time when the fields of statistics and psychological measurement were developing. These fields were gaining strength, and had as their central concerns engineering societies and controlling populations in a new and growing nation with a new growing middle class and a firmly established elite Protestant class.

Between 1860 and 1930, ranking people numerically was about making America great by grouping people for particular purposes, such as deciding who was most fit to be full citizens, who should take on critical jobs, and who should have babies. We're talking about eugenics, state enforced sterilization laws, intelligence testing that led to the growth of the asylum systems in the nineteen century, and other projects based on White racial supremacy.

Oregon illustrates well the anxieties in the nation over education and citizenship at this critical time when grading was established as something we do in schools. Oregon did not pass a compulsory school law until 1922, informally called the " Oregon School Law." The law mandated that all 8 to 16 year olds must attend Oregon public schools. This law was really meant to close down private Catholic schools and convert foriegn-born Catholic immigrants into "Americans," that is, Protestant Americans.

While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that the law was unconstitutional, this law illustrates a larger national anxiety around who an "American" really should be and how they become so. Class, race, religion, and language were markers in people that produced this national anxiety by seeming to mark lower or higher merit and qualities in different people. Schools and colleges were understood as one cure for this problem, as they always had been for other social ills, such as the Devil's influence.

Schools were citizen-building factories. Grading was the way to manage all those diverse students and produce the correct kind of citizens. At the time, many students were seen as not meritorious because they were not yet White enough. They were immigrants, Jews, and Catholics, many of whom didn't speak England-inspired English, and didn't come from England. One example of this U.S. anxiety can be seen in an infamous anti-Irish political cartoon of 1889 (see image) in the popular magazine Puck.

Between 1886 and 1925, 13 million new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooded into the nation, many of them were Catholic. Professor Ellwood Cubberley of Stanford, who specialized in educational administration and later would be dean of the School of Education at Stanford, offered a common way many understood these new immigrants. He describes them in his 1909 book on education in the U.S. Professor Cubberley calls the new immigrants "illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative and not possessing Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government." He concludes that these new immigrants will "dilute tremendously our national stock and ... corrupt our civic life."

To read more on the "Oregon School Law," Cubberley, and 19th and 20th century immigration and schooling, see Lloyd P. Jorgenson, "The Oregon School Law of 1922: Passage and Sequel," The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Oct., 1968), pp. 455-466; and David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs, (New York: Basic Books, 2018, originally 2005).

Cubberley's racist ideas were not original or new. They were commonplace. In 1870, Francis Amasa Walker, an economist and statistician who headed the U.S. Census Bureau and was a Boston elite who later became the President of MIT, railed against Catholics and Irish, and against the eastern and southern European immigrants coming to America. Through his census data, Walker saw these new immigrants lowering the birth rates of native born Americans. These new immigrants were bad for the U.S. as a nation, he thought. While they might not be Black or Asian, which were also undesirable, these new immigrants were not English White. Most didn't speak England-English, and too many of them were not Protestant.

At this moment in U.S. history, merit wasn't simply about one's social standing or family background, it was also about one's racial and language backgrounds. Merit was in many ways synonymous with one's perceived race, language practices, and the values and characteristics that allegedly went along with those dimensions of people. The new immigrants at the time were clearly racialized as not-quite White, not meritorious, but could be if they were educated, stripped of their Catholicism or Judaism, and took on the British-influenced English language of the U.S.

Additional pressures, particularly in newly established states like Oregon, created more need for grades in schools. The quickly expanding U.S. needed a larger managerial class, a middle class, and more farmers and technicians. They needed more compulsory public schools and more college students. To address these needs, the Morrill Act of 1862 established land grant colleges, such as Oregon State University. It gave "public" lands previously occupied by indigenous tribes and Native Americans to states and territories of the U.S. in order to finance or establish colleges and universities for this new White middle class.

This group of people would be trained in these new land-grant colleges in "agriculture and the mechanic arts." The purpose of such colleges was White racial nation building. As you might expect, the first Morrill Act did not account for racial discrimination. It essentially allowed it. The second Morrill Act in 1890 did prohibit it, sort of. It had a provision that as long as there was another option for Black students in the state that was funded in a "just" way, which did not necessarily mean equal, things were okay. Think of it as a version of "separate and unequal." The second Morrill Act provided for many historically Black colleges and universities we have today.

While these new land-grant colleges were being established, other anxieties in the country made things like grades important to have as a way to manage groups of students and prioritize some groups over others. How would one know, for instance, the merit of a newer immigrant student from a student whose parents and perhaps grandparents were native to the U.S., meaning they were likely from England, not southern or eastern Europe? What this question really asks is how close to Protestant English is this new immigrant student, who is likely Italian, Greek, Hungarian, or Polish and who may be Jewish or Catholic. Ranking in schools could offer a way to answer this question, since it mimicked the traditions of social and other rankings of people, usually by assumed inherent traits or capacities, which proliferated during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

To illustrate how important race was to merit and one's fitness for citizenship in the U.S, consider Oregon again. In 1850, nine years before the territory was a state, the Donation Land Act granted Whites exclusive rights to own land in the territory. Over 80 years before the 1922 Oregon School Law, the Oregon territorial government and its residents were increasingly worried about Black residents coming in. Despite not being able to own land, Black residents had been excluded from the territory and later the state by Oregon's numerous Black Exclusion Laws (see also Black Laws of Oregon, 1844-1857; and Exclusion Laws). These started as territorial laws in 1844, which by default made Blacks and other minoritized groups, such as Chinese and Japanese, not potential students in the state's schools and colleges. From its beginnings, Oregon was established as a White territory and state.

In fact, section 35 of the Bill of Rights of the Oregon state constitution, ratified by voters in 1857, had officially made Oregon a "no Black" resident and no race-mixing state. While in 1925 the Oregon legislature repealed this section of the constitution, and that decision was ratified by voters in 1926, it explains why to this day Oregon has so few Black residents, currently around 2 percent. Oregon has been a hostile place for Black people, even after the repeal of section 35 of its Bill of Rights. But it wasn't alone. Oregon was following the lead of similar laws in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio, among other states (see also Systemic Inequality: Displacement, Exclusion, and Segregation). These were the places its White residents were coming from.

Schools and colleges in the new states of the West, like Oregon, were the primary places to make the new nation and its citizens, at least the really important ones, the citizens who would make important decisions, run things, and lead the country. Ranking these students along their abilities in language and other areas seemed important in order to find the best and brightest among the racially White and almost White. Grades were an important part of this gatekeeping since they ranked students by how English and Protestant they were in pseudo-scientific and seemingly precise terms. Numbers, categories, and names sounded scientific, especially since they were coming from White authorities. Race and immigration status were tangled up in these ranking systems that all schools and colleges participated in too.

Oregon history indicates the racial, language, and religious anxieties of Oregon citizens and how important they felt such dimensions were to being an Oregonian and an American. There was nothing special about Oregon. The White people in that state reflected larger national anxieties and racism. As Cubberley's comments illustrate, most people at the time assumed that traits and behaviors of people, just like social family status, were inherited or at least a deep part of one's background. Race was understood as a good way to identify a person's capabilities and potential in society, just as language and religion were. No one was arguing against Professor Cubberley's racist statements about the new immigrants. He was stating the common sense of the time. And it took more than 80 years to repeal Black Exclusion laws in Oregon.

Grades were a part of the systems that managed and excluded people in society, which began in elite colleges of the East coast, and multiplied in compulsory schools and land-grant colleges in the latter part of the 19th century. The grading of people in other ways flourished at this same time, a moment when the solutions to engineering a better society were dominated by voices like Cubberley, Francis Galton, and Lothrop Stoddard. These men advocated for eugenics, racial cleansing, and White racial supremacy.

So, where do grades come from and what do they teach us about today's grading? They come from a short history of managing people for very particular, elite White supremacist reasons. Their purposes were to exclude some people from elite places in society, and designate some places for the Whitest and most Christian of people. Their purposes were to rank people in ways that matched the elitist and racist biases of those doing the ranking and engineering of society, the ones who ended up benefitted most from the grading systems. Their purposes were to help build a particular kind of homogeneous, White, monolingual, England-English speaking, Protestant America.

And today, it is very hard to recognize these biases because grades in writing classrooms have been with us for as long as we can remember. And yet, they are a relatively new invention in schools. Their biases for ranking people along social, racial, linguistic, and other dimensions in us are not simply an old fashioned and obsolete way of understanding people in society. These biases are harmful to a more democratic and equitable society and classroom. In short, grading has always participated in White racial supremacy and elitism. Classrooms today can do much better.

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This is a series of blogposts meant for students who are in courses using grading contracts of some kind to determine their final course grades, or those who just want to understand better what grades are, what they do in classrooms, and how they effect learning.

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Thanks to Marie for sharing this Bonni Stachowiak conversation with Jesse Stommel: How to Ungrade (and the  Teaching in Higher Ed podcast archive is full of treasures!)

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Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 217 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Jesse Stommel shares about how to ungrade.

Production Credit: [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:48] It's been a long time since I've got to have a conversation, at least one that took place in the audio form with today's guest Jesse Stommel. It's been too long in fact. I'm excited to say that not only will he be joining me for today's episode, but there are many episodes in the coming months where he'll be either directly part of an episode or some of the people that he has collaborated with through the digital pedagogy lab will be joining us as well so I'm grateful for that.

Bonni: [00:01:20] Let me start out by telling you a little bit about Jesse. Jesse Stommel is Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington. Jesse is also the Co-Founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy and Open Access Journal of Learning, Teaching, and Technology. Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, and new media. Jesse experiment's relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He's got a rascal pup, Emily, two clever cat's Loki and Odin and a bad ass daughter. He is online at jessestommel.com and on Twitter @jessifer.

Bonni: [00:02:17] Jesse, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jesse: [00:02:20] It's good to be with you again.

Bonni: [00:02:22] Today we are going to tackle the ever so easy topic of grading. And you are going to clear up all the questions we have and all the challenges. [laughing]

Jesse: [00:02:31] I feel like when you say the word grading that either you should have kind of a "DUN DUN DUN." There needs to be a musical cue every time in higher education that the word grades or assessment is mentioned. Or it could even be the Darth Vader march...

Bonni: [00:02:47] Yeah. What are some of the challenges with the way that we think about an approach grading in higher education?

Jesse: [00:02:54] Well it actually connects to that last comment that I made about the Darth Vader march, which in some ways I say cheekily but there is almost a way in which over as many years as I've been talking about teaching, talking about pedagogy, it feels like almost every conversation grades end up being the elephant in the room of the conversation. And a couple different things here. You're almost certain that grades are going to come up. So if you're talking about experimental assignment design, you're certain to get the question but how would I grade that?

Jesse: [00:03:25] So two features. One is that it's constantly a kind of elephant in the room. But I think it often kind of kills the conversation because it ends up not allowing us to move forward in our thinking about how we approach the work of teaching. It ends up being almost a wall that we crash up against when we're talking about innovative pedagogy, when we're talking about our experience as teachers, or even talking about the feelings that we associate with the work of teaching. Almost any conversation, grades are almost certainly going to come up.

Bonni: [00:04:02] When I had asked Asao Inoue on this show one of the examples he- he didn't describe it this way but in my head I took it this way- of just bad grading was writing "AWK" on someone's paper and I thought oh I did that. I did that for years. For years I did that I thought it was helpful maybe because the sentence TO ME, he kept emphasizing "TO ME it wasn't clear, TO ME" and that's not actually helpful at all. Not not at all when I think about it from the students perspective. I think that one of the challenges is we make a lot of assumptions about our learners. In that particular case for me, well you didn't do the work. You were doing this at the last minute and you didn't care and you purposely and there's air quotes about it and you purposely wrote an awkward sentence. Right.

Bonni: [00:04:58] Can you talk about some of the challenges just with how the way that we grade is so loaded with assumptions about our students and therefore is not helpful to them in most cases?

Jesse: [00:05:12] Yeah. I was going to start a sentence with the problem of grades... And I feel like I've I've used that sentence a lot in my career and that it always has something else at the second half because there are quite a lot of problems with grades. But I think in this instance, the problem of grades is the way that they become a shorthand. And the way that we rely on them as a shorthand, as a way of talking about complex things in the learning environment, complex things in a student paper, a way that we kind of reduce the complexity of learning and the complexity of the relationship between a student and teacher into a shorthand.

Jesse: [00:05:53] But what's interesting about that shorthand is it's usually a shorthand that that teacher is extraordinarily well skilled in. Teachers are almost stenographers in the shorthand of grades, grading, marking. And the student on the other end, it doesn't really have any power in that economy. They don't really have any facility with that language necessarily. And they also don't have any control or command over that language.

Jesse: [00:06:19] So when we reduce these complex interactions and discussions about what it is to learn? Or did you learn? Or what is it that you're learning? Or how are you learning? When we reduce those to things like AWK or A/A- or A-/B+ or upper third. All of these strange demarcations that really don't facilitate the communication the feedback that we're trying to have.

Bonni: [00:06:48] We've looked at why you don't grade. What are some of the inherent challenges of it. And one of the things then that has to happen is we have to unlearn a lot of things. And that I mean we have to do this individually. And then our institutions also have to go through this discovery process- I mean we can only hope that our institutions start to question the ways in which we're approaching this.

Bonni: [00:07:15] I was thinking about when Cathy Davidson was on and she shared about her book A New Education that the meat graders did not even find that grades of meat, ABCD were useful enough to them in grading what we might eat. So what we need to unlearn in order to rethink this? And you've called this ungrading.

Jesse: [00:07:42] So I recently wrote a couple of blog posts. One is Why I Don't Grade and then the follow up was How to Ungrade. And I very specifically waited quite a while before I wrote the how to ungrade piece even though it was all in my brain. I waited because I almost feel like we move too quickly to best practices. We move too quickly to how do I do it? Rather than really sitting and thinking about why do we do this? Why do we grade it? When I lead workshops on grading I usually spent a good hour just talking about how does it feel grade? Why do we do it? When did it first happen for us?

Jesse: [00:08:17] So in some ways I kind of want a delay gratification of just jumping in to the how to. But I would say that the biggest how to, and this is both for individuals and institutions, is recognizing that our pedagogic approaches are idiosyncratic and that they should be. We have to recognize that there aren't best practices around grades and assessment and giving feedback to students. That ourwork with students as idiosyncratic. Our work as teachers is idiosyncratic.

Jesse: [00:08:45] And it's also subjective. We try and imagine that we can have some objective measure of learning but something as complicated as learning can't be reduced to an algorithm. It can't be reduced to rows in a spreadsheet. We actually even need the subjective ability of humans to recognize that we are all different. Every teacher is different. All students are different. Which means we have to approach the student as themselves not just as a series of rows and columns and spreadsheets.

Bonni: [00:09:15] What have you found was the reaction to these two posts- maybe the reaction to the first post. I have found that you don't always have a lot of super happy agreeable people on Twitter when I venture over to your tweets.

Jesse: [00:09:28] Well actually what's interesting is that I find that the response to my work on grading and my pushback against grading is usually a lot of people sharing stories with me about the way that grades and that our institutional systems negatively affect the work that they do. So I tend to get a lot of people telling stories and a lot of people agreeing.

Jesse: [00:10:00] I think at this stage of moving to taking action that people have difficulty. And it's in part because our institutions feel like they're on lockdown around issues like learning objectives, around issues of the particular bureaucratic structure that grades live within. And it means that I get a lot of responses like but how could I even do that? But I can't do that at my institution. But I'm an adjunct. But I'm at a community college.

Jesse: [00:10:29] And I get a lot of that. And my response to it is to say well I did it at a community college. I did it as an adjunct. But that isn't a sufficient answer because my experience is very different from other teachers. And so but my response is not to say "I did it, so you could do it too." My response to it is to say this is possible. What we need to do is figure out what is actually possible within our specific circumstances at our specific institution and then go from there.

Jesse: [00:10:59] I don't think it's easy to push back on grading as a system. It is easy though I think to open the conversation about what grades are, how they work, how we can move away from them, how we can work within a system that requires them, open that conversation to students and include students in sort of medalevel dialogue about what grades mean. And that helps a lot.

Jesse: [00:11:24] So I guess my best practice that I would say, the thing that I would recommend for anyone interested in pushing on grading is you don't even actually start with ungrading or removing grades from your classroom. Start by just talking to students about how grades work, what they mean, who they affect, how they affect different students differently. Because in a way they're a power code which means that they are power code that more privileged students have access to more of the control and agency that they need around grades than students who are less privileged.

Jesse: [00:12:00] And also to some degree because of that if you take grades off the table that can also be damaging because sometimes if you take grades off the table, you don't really take off the internalized tacit intrinsic stuff that is lying underneath grades. The grade as a symbol of a way that we engage with students and the way that education thinks about students and teachers. Just taking the grade off the table doesn't do the harder work of demystifying that culture that we've created within education.

Bonni: [00:12:32] I can remember when I was early in teaching in a doctoral program that I had a flight to catch and I needed to get on the road with the rental car and didn't set my boundaries very well and wound up speaking with a student who is very upset about the grade on her paper and we went through it and printed it down and going through it all in excruciating detail. And I should have set better boundaries, I didn't.

Bonni: [00:12:55] And I got home and of course I'm going to follow up and I'm looking through it and I realize actually- because the highest grade you can earn in this program is an A. We had a 45 minute conversation and this woman was still clearly in the clear for a very very high A, even though there's no such thing as a high A. But it was like what you're describing to me is all the things that had come before for her in her educational life that reduced this grade to something so punitive and we're talking just a few points off. But just that we just we are part of a greater system we're also a part of a past of what these students have experienced in grades. And I've been speaking about grades a lot as feedback because that is how I tend to think about them. But of course a lot of people want to use grades for different reasons too. They want to use grades to differentiate the quality- it's meat, it's all back to the meat and the quality of the meat. Oh wait sorry the quality of the papers, the quality of the students. And yeah that's another.

Jesse: [00:13:57] Well I think that the grades get used as a motivator. Grades get used as a sort of punishment. Grades also get used as a way to rank students against one another as a ranking system. And they also get used as a way to communicate to the board or to the accredidation rating board that stuff is happening. So grades are used in so many different ways and I think it's pretty rare that they're only used as feedback.

Jesse: [00:14:29] And I think if we think about grades as feedback immediately I think well is there a better way to give feedback? And what is the better way? So Peter Elbo who has inspired a lot of my kind of practice my day to day practice around grading, he has several different pieces that I really like. One piece he talks about minimal grading and essentially he talks about a system that has a hundred points. So there's a hundred different demarcations. If you give one student and 89 and you give another student an 88. What does that mean to them? What does an 88 intrinsically mean? What does an 89 intrinsically mean? They actually don't communicate anything different to those two students except that one was better than the other. That's the only thing that really gets communicated because what does an 87 mean? I'm an 87. My paper is an 87. It really doesn't convey very much. And so that's a lot, 100 demarcations.

Jesse: [00:15:25] If you go to a grading system where it's A+, A, A-, B, B+, B-. You're still looking at- I think I can't do the math in my head. 15 demarcations. If I tell you you're a 13. Your work is a 13 or your work is a 14.

Jesse: [00:15:43] Does that really convey- does that really give feedback except that if you're 14 you're better than 13? So again and then he kind of goes even- So he argues for there being fewer and fewer demarcations. So a system where you have exemplary, meets expectations, does not meet expectations, a three level system is extraordinarily clear. Each of those levels is extraordinarily clear. And there is very little room to compare students to one another within that system.

Jesse: [00:16:12] And then he goes even further to say you could have a 2 point or a one point or zero point scale. So you could have an assignment where students either turn it in or they don't. And you could also have a zero point scale where students are asked to do the work but then their work is never actually checked. So in a sense they are asked to do the work. But you're not policing whether they do or do not do the work.

Jesse: [00:16:36] And so his argument is that we think about the different assignments we're offering and we think about what kind of scale is actually going to communicate best to the student. So a journal for example, oftentimes people will check journals if the students are asked to journal. They'll look at the Journal. Does that really create the kind of skills that we want to create when we ask students to journal? Journals are about self reflection. It's about intrinsic motivation. It's about touching base with yourself. The idea that a teacher would check your journal for whether or not you did it seems to remove a lot of what a journal is for. And so that might be a perfectly appropriate thing to use a zero point scale. So if students didn't do it, they just didn't do it.

Jesse: [00:17:19] And something like participating in a conversation. Did you show up for the conversation? How do you how do you measure that? And oftentimes we're measuring the wrong things because. Did you show up for the conversation? Usually we measure did you speak within the conversation? Which really does harm to introverts for example or people from different cultures where there are different cultural norms where participating in a conversation doesn't always mean speaking. And in fact, we need people in conversations who are listening, who are summarizing, we need people to play different roles and conversation. So in that sense ranking students against one another doesn't end up being a very good mechanism for creating community. Because you actually don't want every student to be the same. You want students to be different from one another and to succeed in different ways.

Bonni: [00:18:09] I know that you have some real criticisms of the use of rubrics. I did want to mention that I have used rubrics to try to avoid something which is-

Jesse: [00:18:25] [both laughing] DUN-DUN-DUN. The Darth Vader music comes in. Bonni Uses rubrics!

Bonni: [00:18:25] I know. I'm trying to less and less, I promise. But one of the things I used to do was allow poor- what I construed as poor writing skills to have what is called the halo effect or the opposite of the Halo Effect where because that wasn't good, then the whole entire evaluation of the paper came down. They could have had some really good insights. So That has been helpful I wonder if Peter Elbow's work or your thoughts on this if there are ways in which we cannot allow one aspect of what we're evaluating to become overemphasized in our evaluation.

Jesse: [00:19:07] What's interesting is that I talk about the minimal grading and I talk about how using fewer demarcations can create and offer better feedback. There's another extreme that we could go to in a positive way which is to recognize that humans are really high resolution. By that I mean that we are millions of pixels. That our work as millions of pixels. That our work has millions of different variables happening within it. So to try and reduce that to a number like 87, your work is an 87 reduces the complexity of human creativity, human conversation, human dialogue. And so to recognize that sometimes we just need to talk to students about what they're learning and talk to them about their learning and not have expectations about what shape that conversation might take. Be open for surprise. Great books don't create much space in them for surprise. I think often the worst rubrics don't create space for surprise. They don't create space for discovery or epiphanies, things you wouldn't expect. They try to anticipate learning.

Jesse: [00:20:16] And so my pushback against rubrics is twofold. One is that they try and imagine that we can know what students should and could learn before they do. The other thing that I would pushback on is that making a rubric is a really really great way of thinking through what the goals of an assignment are. It's a great way to think through what learning looks like, what success looks like. And so I ask why wouldn't we have students do that? Why are we taking from students the most important kind of activity, the most important metacognitive work that they could do? So that's why if if people want to use rubrics I say well have students build them. Or at least have students build them with you. Or talk to students about them so that they're doing that work. And it's the same reason why when I talk about not grading people ask well what is it that you do do? Don't institutions require you to submit a final grade at the end? Of course they do. I know. They all have. And I submit a final grade at the end. And what I do in my teaching is self evaluations and I have students doing a lot of self evaluating, some peer evaluating as well. But the self-evaluation sort of reflective letters, process letters, process essays, and artist statements depending on the class.

Jesse: [00:21:41] One of the things I would say about that is that students often know better whether they're learning than I could because I'm not inside their brain. They are. And so why not rely on them?

Jesse: [00:21:52] The other thing I would say is that evaluating is a way that we learn. And so asking them to evaluate themselves ends up being a really important learning experience for them. And it wouldn't work the same way if they were asked to do a self evaluation but at the end of the day I was just going to be the one evaluating them because it wouldn't seem real. And so having it be actually real. Ninety five percent of the time I take the grade they gave themselves and I bubble it in on the bubble sheet at the end of the term.

Jesse: [00:22:25] I do change sometimes and that's mostly when someone- when it's clear that they're either not fully engaged in the process of self evaluating or and this is more often when they are belittling themselves when they're not. When they say something like I did everything but I just I'm not an A person, so I'm going to give myself an A minus. That's the other thing that I'm not willing to accept. I'm not willing to accept modesty I guess in self-evaluation. Honesty is what I'm looking for.

Bonni: [00:22:59] In your role of faculty development you are not only coaching and advising those that teach in the humanities. What inspiration have you taken from people doing some work on rethinking grading in the sciences?

Jesse: [00:23:15] Well one thing I would say about that is that when I talk about grading I often get pushback. While this wouldn't work in my discipline or this wouldn't work in the sciences, this wouldn't work in my statistics class. And I always find that strange because I think I don't necessarily think of disciplines as discrete containers. They're complex. And so to lump the entirety of a discipline into one container that way has never made sense to me. It's a very humanity's way of thinking though I recognize that that sort of disciplines don't exist. Everything's fuzzy.

[00:23:50] Interestingly the first pedagogy book I ever read was a book called How Children Fail by John Holt. It's a book about elementary math education. Some of my most basic fundamental pedagogy and approaches to grading are inspired by this book by John Holt who is talking about teaching math and really talking about the need for in the sciences and math and the social sciences to push even harder on systems that would imagine that there are discrete truths or that there are discrete measures for success. So essentially he's arguing that math is actually extraordinarily complex. So to reduce the measure of success within a discipline like math is to confuse the complexity of that discipline.

Jesse: [00:24:41] So I find that that the people who I'm really inspired by are not necessarily the people who are grading like I do or teaching like I do. But the people who are thinking really critically about what their work in their particular classroom looks like and how they can push upon it.

Jesse: [00:24:56] I have a colleague at University of Mary Washington, Parrish Waters who is currently using a tool called Blue Pulse. And he's using Blue Pulse to have students to give feedback. And they both give feedback on the class and the tool kind of allows for real- I haven't used it extensively myself- but it allows for real time either anonymous or not anonymous feedback. And so he has it so that the students can kind of give- it's almost like a real high resolution version of a clicker. So it's not just A, B, or C but it's that students can actually offer feedback about what they're learning, what they're stumbling blocks are. They can give feedback on the class as it's happening and it's not really feedback to him. This is working, this isn't working. But it's also like almost like a check and it's like a constant real time way that they're checking in. And he uses that tool in order to get the pulse of the room, to sort of feel what the hum of the room is. But I think it also could be used for a kind of self reflective metacognitive here's where I'm at right now check in.

Bonni: [00:25:59] Jesse, what else should we be thinking about in terms of how to ungrade?

Jesse: [00:26:05] I think we should be thinking about not necessarily jumping full on into the pool, thinking about how we can start to dip our toes in and how we can let our legs dangle in the water. So if you can't just eliminate grades from your classroom, think about what you can do. What subtle changes can you make? And actually I find that that works better because then if you change only one thing, one small thing you end up getting a lot of feedback about whether it was successful or not. If you change everything in your teaching and you have a very different experience in the classroom, you can't always know what thing that you changed made a difference.

Jesse: [00:26:37] So one of the things I would recommend is don't think about removing grading from your entire class. Can you remove it from one piece of your class? Can you create grade free zones? So for example, what if there were no grades for the first third of the term? And then grades start. And so in a sense, you could talk about that first third of the class as a developmental space. It's like the playground, the sandbox. And then we're going to get sort of prepped for the other work that we're going to do in the last two thirds of the class.

Jesse: [00:27:08] Now one thing to mention is that you could create grade free zones. You have to be really careful about how you do it because if you create a grade free zone for the last third of the class and there's grades for the first two thirds but then you remove them from the last third. It's not going to work quite as well because we're so easy to fall into the trap of grading ourselves, grading each other, thinking about our work as graded that it's a little harder to pull people out of it at the end. But if you are creating a grade free zone at the beginning, it's a really nice space for students to just do the work at the class.

Jesse: [00:27:44] So oftentimes I just don't- even with self-evaluations, I don't have students self evaluating until at least a third of the way through the class because I just want to just let's not worry about that yet. We can worry about that later. In fact we're all going to worry about that. So let's take a break.

Bonni: [00:27:59] One of the things you talked about is not just thinking about grades in terms of evaluating but also in terms of motivation. And one of the ways I continue to just be inspired is thinking about open education because you want to really get motivation for your students. And as you pointed out, this is something you can actually do in relatively small ways that don't require drastic changes in your teaching but open up the classroom a little bit. Invite people in to give students feedback on their work. Send students out to get feedback on their work.

Bonni: [00:28:31] I will never forget just in terms of having what are traditionally called Poster sessions. But to me, it was like building a fair. I mean I had students build a Barbie Dream House. It was three dimensional. I mean just incredible the work they did. But I also had a young man whose dad died a couple of weeks before that event. And what was important to me was that he didn't feel like people took pity on him to get his education, so he did fulfill the assignment. But it was done. And it met the expectations. So I had it sort of for that not a huge grade you know rigor around it. But to see the extent with which the creativity flourished and a lot of that was because of these this extra presence and the value that that might bring to some of them not to all of them.

Jesse: [00:29:21] Yeah. I actually try and have all of the work that my students do, I would call that authentic assessment. That there is there is actually something not bureaucratic in the structure of the class that is giving them feedback, whether they're getting feedback from each other, or doing something like putting on a film festival and getting authentic feedback from the community, from a community of peers that they really respect.

Jesse: [00:29:48] And so I actually don't have probably even more radical than me not grading is I don't have any of my students turn in their work to me. I don't receive any work throughout the term. I talk about this as me going to the work rather than the work coming to me. I'm not an inbox for student work. Instead what I am is I'm a curious listener and a sort of expert feedback giver of student work. I'm an expert reader of their work but I'm still a reader. I'm still someone who's curious and interested in them. And so I have them either put put their work on a blog, put their work in a museum gallery, and then I go to the work.

Jesse: [00:30:31] And I think that's an important shift. You know we're not receptacles. So when you start to push on the notion of grading what you start to realize is that we've built a whole system that's designed- Why do we receive work as though we're in boxes? So that we can efficiently grade it and give it back to students. But the problem there is not as much the the grades. The problem is that symptom that it creates this transactional relationship between us and students.

Bonni: [00:30:57] This is the time and the show in which we each get to give recommendations. And I have two. One is just off of what Dessie just said about becoming curious and interested in our students. And it's an exercise that I'd like to do that in some context is called Examen, but it's this idea of asking two questions. You can do this with yourself when you're journaling, or you could do with a group of people like in the class. And ask since the last time we met, what brought you life? And since the last time we we met, what took life away from you?

Bonni: [00:31:29] I find when I do it I often get "what does this life thing mean? What are you talking about?" So sometimes I'll use the word joy and what's brought you joy since we last got together? And what has taken that joy away from you? And not forcing everyone to respond. Everyone can pass and I try not to go ever in a particular order so it's not a forced response.

Bonni: [00:31:50] But I really work to be curious and interested in my students on everything from what that process brings up is really some of the deeper things that are going on in their lives all the way to sometimes texting back and forth, music, songs that they think I'll like or songs I think they'll like. I mean that's just fun to know what music they're into, what are they watching, what are they reading, and what are they experiencing? And especially if it's something new and different that I'm not accustomed to, really hearing more about that and they get a kick out of it. So that's my first recommendation is a couple of questions you can ask to really bring a sense of community.

Bonni: [00:32:24] And then the second one is a documentary on HBO called The Final Year. And it's really well done documentary looking at the final year of Obama's presidency. These are some tremendous leaders that are profiled in this documentary that, to me, just exude the values of our country. And it's just a really well done piece of work. So it's The Final Year and it looks at the last year of Obama's presidency. And Jesse, I'm going to pass it over to you to recommend.

Jesse: [00:32:55] Actually I have two. One has a book that I haven't recommended to people in a long time, but somehow our conversation reminded me of it. And it is the book the Deep Play by Diane Ackerman. She starts by talking about different animal species that play regularly and about how play is used as a sort of a learning mechanism. For most animals, like think of kittens playing in order to learn how to be kittens. But then she also talks about animal species where play as intrinsic and where they continue to do it as adults. In particular she talks about whales and she talks about ravens and magpies. And it reminds me how important that that space of play is for learning and about how grading ends up frustrating that play.

Jesse: [00:33:46] And it connects to my other recommendation which is the documentary because you said a documentary. This one popped into my mind. It is a nailbiter. It's like a suspenseful documentary, I teach documentary film and there's not a lot of documentaries that are like end of your seat thrillers. This one is called Icarus. It's a Netflix documentary and it's about doping in sports. And it's about essentially the large network of cheating within sports. And it's interesting to me that I think about like sports, games, play, cheating like why is that that there exists within within the sports community this large network of doping in order to cheat or win. It feels like almost the ranking of people against one another within sports creates an environment that not only makes cheating thrive but almost makes cheating necessary and that's what this documentary interestingly explores. But I think in some ways, if we're worried about students cheating, the answer is not to punish them for the cheating, the answer is to find out what that's a symptom of. Like what's the deeper problem?

Bonni: [00:34:53] Thank you so much for those recommendations and for this conversation about ungrading. I'm looking forward to our future conversations because we have an opportunity to bring some of the people that you have been involved with with the digital pedagogy lab into future episodes. I'm just looking forward to those airing and how those stories all get woven together. I just treasure the opportunity to continue to learn from you. You're my faculty development professional. I don't know if you know it or not. You don't get paid very well for that job. It's just so fun being connected with you.

Jesse: [00:35:26] Yeah great. I would love to live on this podcast if I could.

Bonni: [00:35:29] Oh and I'd love to have you do it. Thanks so much for being back.

Jesse: [00:35:34] Thanks.

Bonni: [00:35:36] It's been great getting to have another conversation with Jesse Stommel today and I look forward to the ones I mentioned earlier are going to be coming in the next few months. And thanks for your collaboration Jesse and bringing in some of your participants in the digital pedagogy lab to future episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:35:56] Thanks to all of you for listening and for your continued ideas for who might be a good guest for the show. There's a way to submit a potential guest on the Teaching in Higher Ed website if you'd like to do that or you're always welcome to send me a tweet. I'm on Twitter @Bonni208. Thanks for listening. We've got some great guests coming up and excited. Look for a new academic year and all the possibilities they're in. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Jesse Stommel shares about how to ungrade on episode 217 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

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Networked Educators & Learners graphic by Giulia Forsythe

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At the Slack, Ken shared a blog post he wrote, and it includes a super graphic also from Giulia Forsythe! #Ungrading, Rest and Reboot, or Subterranean Homesick Blues.

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You can learn about this lovely project here Martha Burtis: Introducing Ungrading: A Chapbook... and you can also find it at the Internet Archive: Ungrading Chapbook at the Archive. Thanks so much to Beth for sharing this in the Slack!

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At the Slack, Heather recommended this wonderful Twitter thread from Sybil about her presentation: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.”

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1: Hello, Twitter ppl. I’ve been teaching in some capacity (k12, university, #tyc) since 1999; right now, I teach #fyw college composition & creative writing at @ndscswildcats #NDSCS. 
My #MWSoTL presentation is: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.” #LotsOfBitmojis #TenPostsTotal

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1: Hello, Twitter ppl. I’ve been teaching in some capacity (k12, university, #tyc) since 1999; right now, I teach #fyw college composition & creative writing at @ndscswildcats #NDSCS. 
My #MWSoTL presentation is: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.” #LotsOfBitmojis #TenPostsTotal https://t.co/niIGGhCdQG

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1: Hello, Twitter ppl. I’ve been teaching in some capacity (k12, university, #tyc) since 1999; right now, I teach #fyw college composition & creative writing at @ndscswildcats #NDSCS.
My #MWSoTL presentation is: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.” #LotsOfBitmojis #TenPostsTotal pic.twitter.com/niIGGhCdQG
— Sybil (@ihaveabug) March 31, 2022

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1: Hello, Twitter ppl. I’ve been teaching in some capacity (k12, university, #tyc) since 1999; right now, I teach #fyw college composition & creative writing at @ndscswildcats #NDSCS. 
My #MWSoTL presentation is: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.” #LotsOfBitmojis #TenPostsTotal https://t.co/niIGGhCdQG

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1: Hello, Twitter ppl. I’ve been teaching in some capacity (k12, university, #tyc) since 1999; right now, I teach #fyw college composition & creative writing at @ndscswildcats #NDSCS. 
My #MWSoTL presentation is: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.” #LotsOfBitmojis #TenPostsTotal https://t.co/niIGGhCdQG

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1: Hello, Twitter ppl. I’ve been teaching in some capacity (k12, university, #tyc) since 1999; right now, I teach #fyw college composition & creative writing at @ndscswildcats #NDSCS. 
My #MWSoTL presentation is: “How #Ungrading Has Saved My Soul.” #LotsOfBitmojis #TenPostsTotal

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Another book recommendation from Matthew Cheney via the Slack, and it's also available at Internet Archive: Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing by Peter Elbow.

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A book recommendation from Matthew Cheney via the Slack, and YES, it is available to all at the Internet Archive, just a click away: Compulsory Miseducation by Paul Goodman.

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A quote from Lilla Watson via Rissa at the Slack!
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

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There is a very lively #Ungrading community at Twitter... ask questions, and you will get answers. Very helpful and supportive!

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Ungrading Beginnings with Rissa! :-)

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Sharing My Syllabus, as recommended by the wonderful Dr. Laura Gibbs! 

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Sharing My Syllabus, as recommended by the wonderful Dr. Laura Gibbs! 