Category: Events

On Thursday 1 April 2022, the OpenLab Community Team hosted three emerging scholars exploring abolitionist pedagogies, resisting increased institutional surveillance of students, and ungrading strategies. Co-authors Marianne Madoré, Andréa Stella, and Anna Zeemont shared their experiences with pedagogical practices and activism. We were excited to welcome faculty from City Tech and Baruch to this workshop, the second in a series on Ungrading.

Dr. Zeemont wanted to discuss the process of putting together a collaborative article including NTT and precarious academic workers alongside students for the article, while Adjunct Assistant Professor Stella discussed the importance of including citations in her own course syllabi, both to help explain ungrading policies to students, but also to stave off any potential conflicts with administration. Including citations provides scholarly context for ungrading and demonstrates that an instructor practicing different forms of ungrading is not a rogue agent, but rather part of a larger movement towards equity and anti-racism in higher education. 

PhD student Madoré shared more important historical information about activist group Free CUNY and the 2020 As for All manifesto co-authored by members of the CUNY community working towards liberationist pedagogy and antiracist education.  

Zeemont closed the co-authors’ discussion by reminding attendees that ungrading is not reserved for expensive private colleges, and that incorporating understanding of students’ material conditions is necessary for liberatory pedagogy. 

One of our discussion questions for this event asked participants to consider the connection between ungrading and open digital pedagogy, which is really the focal point of all the OpenLab Open Pedagogy events we plan each semester. While we did not come away with easy answers, we were better able to understand how material inequalities impact our students. Unstable wireless, shared and out-of-date devices, and other technological deficits impact student access to their online courses, while unstable housing, surging inflation, and exploitative working conditions all impact our students’ ability to focus on their studies, and also impact precarious academic workers such as adjunct classroom instructors, non-teaching adjuncts, and college assistants. 

In short, expecting learning to take place seamlessly because we have an engaging and flexible platform like the OpenLab does not impact the material conditions that may block student access to the site, and open digital pedagogy cannot be framed as a utopian cure-all. Instead, we learned to focus on student-centered learning, which requires really listening to students’ needs and concerns.

Reminder: You’re invited to join the OpenLab team for an Open Pedagogy event TODAY!

Looking forward to seeing you there. Here are the details:

• Topic: Open Pedagogy: Ungrading Pt. 2
  Date: Mar 31, 2022
• Time: 4:00-5:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
• Register and join via Zoom

Last semester, we met to discuss ungrading! This is part two of a series of Open Pedagogy workshops the OpenLab Community Team is developing to address inequity in assessment and anti-racist pedagogies. For this event, we’ll be joined by co-authors of a recent article from the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy titled “Resisting Surveillance, Practicing/Imagining the End of Grading” to hear about practical strategies for implementing ungrading into classroom settings. 

From the co-authors:

Our article suggests that grading systems in higher education settings are part of a larger network of surveillance technologies that students and faculty are subjected to and/or enact, reflective of schooling’s place in a “carceral continuum” (Shedd) premised on anti-Blackness and colonialism. We do not believe that grading is something that can be made more fair, just, or anti-racist. To resist surveillance in higher education is to embrace the end of grading. After an overview of these contexts and assertions, we offer a series of reflections, tracing juxtaposing moments where we individually or collectively taught, learned, and/or organized outside/against grading systems.

Questions for discussion:

• Traditional models of education treat instructor and student as adversarial. Instructors often replicate harmful authoritarian structures by embracing institutional surveillance practices and assumptions, including that students are cheating and must be observed at all times, adopting the role of disciplinarian by reporting student misbehavior to the institution. How do we shift this culture of authoritarianism so common in educators?
• Last time we talked about different motivations for learning; what new perspectives do we have on this from discussing ungrading with these scholars?How can we adjust our focus to the intrinsic versus extrinsic values of teaching and learning? 
• Why are we talking about ungrading as the OpenLab team? What does this have to do with open digital pedagogy?

Readings:

Resisting Surveillance, Practicing/Imagining the End of Grading by Marianne Madoré, Anna Zeemont, Joaly Burgos, Jane Guskin, Hailey Lam, and Andréa Stella