The Problem(s) with Grading: Making a Case for Contract Grading
Source: https://americancultures.berkeley.edu/cdf/institute/contract-grading Parent: https://americancultures.berkeley.edu/
Topics
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Playlist: Day 2 of 2, Antiracism Pedagogy & Equity Based Learning Winter Institute
Event Description
Building on the groundwork of the Antiracism Winter Institute, the CDF Program co-sponsored and co-facilitated a follow-up seminar in late April centered on contract grading. The two-day workshop, The Problem(s) with Grading: Making a Case for Contract Grading, invited participants to explore two models of contract grading, Specifications Grading and Labor-based Contract Grading. On the first day, participants engaged in current research that explores how traditional grading methods structure systems of value inequitably and unequally for many students while privileging the experiences and cultural backgrounds of a particular few. Participants met in focus groups to design and develop implementation plans for contract grading for their respective summer or fall teaching assignments. The workshop was co-facilitated with the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Panelists/Speakers
- Kai Nham, MIDS, Program Manager, Creative Discovery Fellows
- Ryan Ikeda, MFA, Pedagogy Coordinator, Creative Discovery Fellows
- Marisella Rodriquez, Ph. D. - Senior Consultant, Center for Teaching and Learning
- Sarah Pickett, Ph. D. - Senior Consultant, Center for Teaching and Learning
- Victoria Robinson, Ph. D. - Director, American Cultures
Labor-based contract grading seeks to level power dynamics among academic hierarchies and to create a relationship of mutuality that disrupts white supremacist logics that position students and teachers within the schema of an efficient transaction. On the contrary, labor-based grading makes space for, and values, the particularities of student experience by refusing the standardized one-size-fits-all rubric of white supremacy.
Ryan Ikeda
Key Takeaways
Specifications Grading is a Learner-centered Approach
Underlying Principles to Specifications Grading
- Grading Practice should be simple.
- Grading Practice should be transparent.
- Grading Practice should be flexible.
- Grading Practice should motivate advanced learning.
- Grading practice should measure learning.
Underlying Principles to Labor Based Grading (LBG)
- Grading Practice should begin from a position of abundance, not scarcity.
- Grading Practices should trust students.
- Grading Practices should value the learning process.
- Grading practices should recognize how letter grades circulate value differently.
Antiracism: Pedagogy, Situating Antiracism Theoretically, and CDF's Approach to Antiracism
Antiracism Pedagogy
Antiracism pedagogy is a complex topic with underpinnings of systemic inequality and decades of scholarly dialogue unpacking its expansive history. We recognize that we won’t have the time in one institute to begin and end a discussion on antiracism pedagogy in the way that it deserves. Instead, we want to begin a dialogue that starts from a place of personal experience and reflection and one that we hope will continue after this event.
- Antiracism - one definition: An active pedagogical approach used to explain and counteract the persistence and impact of systemic inequalities rooted in systemic racism and oppression. Addressing the historical constructs that facilitate inequalities without reservation or risk of ostracism seeks to transform individuality.
Situating Antiracism Theoretically
- Situating Antiracism Theoretically [Day 1 - 47:11]
- There is an abundance of conceptual work to draw from in thinking through the mundane and not so mundane violence that sustains unequal practices and racisms within the classroom. In addition to recent political movements, whose process has become part of our praxis, other constellating points include, among many other artists, scholars, poets,
- Bartolome and Trueba’s insistence that teachers must demonstrate “ideological and political clarity” as a precondition to any equitable system of learning
- Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” & bell hook’s “Teaching to Transgress” situates the positionality of learners, especially learners of color, among a racist and unimaginative structure designed by cishet white men.
- In addition to these, the concept of a “racial imaginary” posited by poet Claudia Rankine’s critical work, with longtime collaborator Beth Loffreda.
- Books by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Zeus Leonardo’s Race, Whiteness, and Education and his more recent work excavate whiteness and logics of white supremacy from purportedly neutral pedagogies surrounding small group work.
- From this work, a common thread is the necessity to disassemble the assumed social fabric of what we call the learning environment and fundamentally the powers that shape it. That disassembly of power is at the heart of antiracism work, and if we are honest, it will make most of us very uncomfortable and unsure of our footing. This is not our invitation to you, but one that endured centuries of white supremacy and structural racism that we now cultivate together.
How does CDF approach antiracism?
- CDF has attempted to think through questions of disassembly from within an institution (which some have marked as problematic), but starting from here, where we are right now within an institutional context and constrained by its infrastructure, to reimagine distributions of power, to develop tactical awareness therein and to intervene, to excavate and make visible white supremacy that has endured as infrastructure since the first American classroom. [Day 1 - 49:24]
- Our approach has been two-fold: to situate our positional history and theoretical inclinations within a 15-week antiracism curriculum modifiable to the constraints of your particular courses and to support students to tell powerful stories for which we consider the leveraging of digital tools – baked within antiracism premises and protocols (such as, challenge existing assumptions, questioning representational frameworks, beliefs, and power structures).
Pedagogical Approaches to Antiracism by Previous Creative Discovery Fellows: Interview with Dr. Pablo Gonzalez
[Interviews begins with viewing Creative Discovery Fellows programmatic video]
Q: Can you share a little bit about any effective approaches to anti-racism you employ in your classroom or that you have witnessed in other academic settings, such as how you transform an anti-racist mindset in your classroom beyond a fad and more towards a practice?
Anti-racism has to be a practice: a lifelong struggle towards the type of change and way you want to see people relate to each other and how you want to dismantle certain power structures that place racists practices and reproduce them across time. [](https://youtu.be/MMB5sub0N-U?t=3420)[Day 1 - 56:54](https://youtu.be/MMB5sub0N-U?t=3414)[]
- Make classrooms into a place of Encuentro (Spanish for encounter):
- Encuentro in Spanish translates more “gathering a place” rather than encounter. This is what we should embody when students or people come and have conversations to share their story, their communities, their desires, and how they see the world.
- Classrooms are a place where we can practice a politics of listening now in the very moment. [Day 1 - 58:35]
- Insist on certain practices and certain politics.
- Acknowledge that listening is key and more difficult than it seems
- Understand that Erasure is a racist practice [Day 1 - 59:43]
- The sense of erasure for students of color and those erased from society and history can be instances like the sentiment of being talked about in the past tense or not having a footnote or reference being made to their communities in academia.
- We are accustomed to hearing certain voices over others in spaces.
- Censuring approaches around erasure means:
- giving space for students to speak about their experiences with erasure
- really listening, because students can let you know how they would like to see erasure combatted.
- Actively use Memory as an anti-racist practice [Day 1 - 1:02:00]
- Memory is a foundation of what students talk about when they “seek community” and a way to combat this sense of a people without a history.
- Going beyond addressing erasure, but the retrieval of memory can build a sense that students belong and are present in the classroom, but they are not an object. Students are a speaking, telling, historical subject as well as your family and community.
- Example Assignments to incorporate Memory:
- Oral History Projects
- These projects are not only about interviewing family and community about their lives but about digging deep into the critical analysis of themes like migration, labor, and intimate stories.
- Students can encounter conversations with their families and communities using this approach to listen to topics and hold spaces outside of the classroom related to their heritage and identity.
- Recording these works allow for these spoken, individual stories to live beyond generations.
- Podcasts: “the modern radio”
- Podcasts are an opportunity for people to hear themselves speak about things that they’ve researched and listened to, and now be able to give an analysis of
- This project can be flexible in nature, with various topic sections throughout the semester and among a collective of students or even whole classes.
- Best practices for podcast development are developing the content in stages: the questions, the recording, and the production.
- Questions: have students think about the writing of their questions to induce storytelling.
- Recording: insist that they listen to themselves on record. That is a personal lived document that they can pass through generations.
- Production: “transcribe their words, let their words speak as if they’re the ones theorizing. “auto historia” is theorizing in the flesh
- Family Photo exhibit [1:06:10]: One project that emerged from one of Pablo’s courses was a podcast and family photos exhibit. Students curated a collection of family photos and related images for each podcast episode and interview. Using Augmented Reality software, students layered the photos with clips from interviews and created an interactive and digital platform to share these stories.
- Always have the levels and intentions in learning environments with a politics of listening, create peoples with histories, and produce new questions to lead students to who they want to be
Q: How do you grade this type of work? [Question from the chat at Day 1 - 1:32:08]
- Understand that there is a politics to reshape how we measure these things. - The traditional sense is to create a rubric — in terms of standards that we want to meet. [Day 1 - 1:32:08]
- Know the limitations. (ie. how do you do podcasts when no one has the equipment and everyone is online)
- I try to see growth and measuring for me has to do with a conversation I want to have with them and really sense what kind of growth they’ve had and that doesn’t necessarily amount to a particular grade but more of “you're starting to have questions, produce questions and in the classroom, we want students with questions, not answers” I know with large classrooms its very difficult to get to know each and every student, but I approach it with the want to get to know each and every student and I want them to know and believe that because that is precisely the kind of work needed for anti-racist work. (paraphrased)
Q: What is your philosophy of teaching and who inspires it? [Day 1 - 1:07:29]
- “Hundreds of hundreds of students inspire my team, but I’m only also myself a student of so many others and I lead with a sense that if we are to think about memory as an anti-virus practice and the retrieval of memory and the telling of memory and the listening of memory then genealogy is one as well." [Day 1 - 1:07:29]
- ”Being an expert as instructors, think about genealogy as an important one facet of philosophy that grounds the practice of teaching."
- Ask yourself and students to think about the genealogies of the fields they’re studying in, or not studying in, what they merge, and the embedded politics of each field.
- Ethnic studies is one of the few fields in the US academy that emerges out of a strike a student struck — completely different circumstances. The genealogies that it emerges from it also emerges from an anti-racist and anti-imperialist strike of students from a place by which they themselves are active not only in the university but across vast lands right across many seas and oceans.
- Many students in the STEM fields, social sciences, and humanities have few courses focused on the genealogy of how the field of their choice emerges, and I think you have to know that and concepts like race.
- Provide students with the tools to be able to understand their place
- Provide an understanding of the logics and the policing of the logic behind (criminality and race and the rise of the prison system, violence)
- A student who talks about the act of the lynch mob shouldn’t be able to talk about the act that happened last week in the US but about what has been happening for longer than that both historically and at this moment
- Do not fear failing in trying to do this kind of work of sense mapping these genealogies because not all the genealogies will lead us to freedom fighters -
- Some of them might lead us to understand the very racist underpinnings of some of these fields. This is something we shouldn't shy away from — in fact, we should engage it even more critically.
- Used the first half of the semester for intensive information, and the second half to allow students to learn and teach you about topics that feel focuses on their beliefs or interests
- Allow them to do research, invite guest speakers, have conversations, create podcasts and creative assignments.
- Understand that students themselves can provide valuable people and new classroom experiences. They are already embedded in so many different genealogies and connected to many networks and their community members. Neighbors are already practicing these things experiences that you would not have been able to.
- Acknowledge that students want this kind of responsibility and opportunity to teach.
- Give as many opportunities for students to go through the politics of listening - politics of living - politics of teaching.
Q: With everything online now, how do you develop a politics of care and build trust intimacy, and belonging in a remote learning environment? [Day 1 - 1:17:34]
In developing a “politics of care,” we have to create spaces of encounter that go beyond the classroom — this is difficult since the virtual classroom cannot be solely our lives. [Day 1 - 1:17:34]
- Think about how [creating these spaces] can be a reality right now. - How can you integrate the politics of listening in other ways and even more?
- Use the very same Office Hours for every class with an open, drop-in structure. Instead titled “Convivial Hours,” Pablo invites students to join him in a place to be convivial while also incorporating a new semantic to reinforce a different nature to these meetings - a necessary action for anti-racist work. “I want students to see an open zoom link and an open door. I want them to enter that room and have a conversation with me and with each other — and in doing so they start building their own politics of care.” I take inspiration from others in their office hours or time outside of the classroom but also in spaces in friendships and communities that further that spaces - like the Multicultural Center at Berkeley "
- Be clear in that you will hold those spaces to give as much attention as you can in those spaces, and what they say in those spaces.
- You won’t know if it is effective, but it shouldn’t stop you from continuing to listen to them and trying to understand and see where your relationship with the student is going and what the students are going through.
Interventions: Syllabus Design, Equity-Based Assessments, and Labor-Based Grading
Syllabus Design
- Syllabus Design [Day 2 - 12:37]
- “A syllabus can be described as a guide to a course that outlines course policies, required texts, a schedule of assignments, and what will be expected of students. However, a syllabus is much more as it describes the course and provides information about the instructor’s personality, teaching style, and approachability. A syllabus offers the first impression of an instructor and the course, sets the tone for the entire class, and thus warrants scrutiny.”
- Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool (Taylor et al., 2019)
- Six syllabus characteristics demonstrating equity-minded practice (developed by the USC Center for Urban Education(link is external))
- Welcoming
- Validating
- Demystifying
- Creating a partnership
- Representing
- Deconstructing
-
Co-Construction Strategy
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Co-constructing a syllabus is collaborating with students to develop a syllabus or syllabus segment rather than being solely determined and designed by the instructor. Evidence suggests that this practice can promote (Edwards, 2011):
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Student agency and ownership over the course (can lead to greater motivation and active participation in learning)
- Authenticity and relevance of the course (can lead to greater motivation and active participation in learning)
- Partnership and collaboration (can influence how students perceive peers and how they perceive other collaborative learning activities)
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Equity-Based Assessments
- Equity-Based Assessments [Day 2 - 35:55]
- One entry point to equitable course design is considering how we might adjust our course content to better reflect tour students' interests, identities, and backgrounds. Culturally Responsive Teaching is one framework that challenges educators to consider how we might integrate content that’s culturally relevant to students as a mechanism for supporting students from communities often excluded from higher education.
- A second entry point to equitable course design is to adjust the course content's delivery and mode so that students have multiple ways to demonstrate their learning. We can take a universal design approach to learn so that learning experiences and assessments are accessible to all or most students. Universal design for learning is a framework that advocates for providing options for all students to take advantage of when a need arises.
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The last entry point is how to adjust our assessment tools and protocols to enhance agency in students’ learning. The topic of assessment generally covers a large body of research in learning science. However, the possibilities of enhancing equity in our assessment tools have gained particular interest over the last decade. Below are a few examples as a reference for where the scholarly conversations around equitable assessment design have expanded.
- The Grading for Equity Framework
- Contract grading
- Specifications grading
Labor-Based Grading
[Note to readers: If you'd like to follow along with the video recording in the equity-based assessment activity, please open this document(link is external)]
- Labor-Based Grading [Day 2 - 48:09]
- Labor-based grading is an example of equity-based assessment. It is also a type of contract grading, where labor or the amount of time students spend on their projects forms the basis for grading (and replaces quality, which has been proven to be culturally-encoded and difficult to assess). “A labor-based grading contract is essentially a set of social agreements with the entire class about how final course grades will be determined for everyone. These agreements are articulated in a contract, a document that is negotiated at the beginning of the term or semester, then reexamined at the midpoint to make sure it is still fair enough for everyone. It is a social, corporate agreement, which means it may not be a product of full consensus, but instead hard agreements. What can we agree upon now that seems fair enough, at least until the midpoint of the quarter or semester? Everyone promises to meet the contract’s stipulations, and the teacher promises to administer the contract in the spirit it has been negotiated.” (Inoue, 2019)
- Given institutional constraints, we can position grading in a larger framework by asking the questions listed below. We have to understand that grades in the institution mean different things and have different academic, economic, and social implications.
- How do we work within an institution to disassemble structural racism and white supremacy?
- How do we signal value within an institution that limits significance to using an A-F grading scale?
- How (and where) do we invite students into the grading process to co-construct their assessments?
Resources
Teaching and Learning Values
- Equity Unbound/OneHE - a repository of instructional videos for facilitating community-building activities and exercises
- The Center for Teaching and Learning - Promoting an Equitable and Inclusive Learning Environment
- CBE-Life Sciences Education - Evidence-based Teaching Guide on Inclusive Teaching
- Columbia CTL - Resource Guide, Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Action
Further Reading on Antiracist Pedagogy
- Blakeney, A.M. (2011). Antiracist pedagogy: Definition, theory, purpose, and professional development Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy 2(1), 119-32.
- hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
- Kailin, Julie. (2002). Antiracist Education: From Theory to Practice Rowman & Littlefield.
- Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria: And other conversations about race. Basic Books.
Antiracism Interventions: Syllabus Design and Equity-Based Assessment
Syllabus Design
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(Padlet) What are three words that come to mind in response to the term “syllabus”?
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Resources:
- “Decolonizing Your Syllabus”
- Liquid Syllabus and additional examples
- Syllabus Review Guide and Inquiry Tool
Equity-based Assessments
- Universal Design Learning
- Culturally Responsive Teaching
- Grading for Equity
- Specifications Grading
- Equity-Based Assessment Workshop
Support
- Curriculum Hub (open enrollment for UCB community, please email americancultures@berkeley.edu for inquiries if you are outside of UCB)
- Student Design Hub (open enrollment, anyone can join, including faculty and students)
- For any questions or further support, please email cd-fellows@berkeley.edu
Real fairness in assessment ecologies is constructed with students and does not need extra things to make up for the fairness that the ecology already lacks. What labor-based contracts assume is that all labor counts and all labor is equal when it comes to calculating course grades.
Asao Inoue
Background
Situating Current Day Events
The institute's recent initiatives are not new and are indeed part of the long slow struggle of dis-manteling systematic racism within education and society. Globally, nationally, and on particular campuses like ours, it is essentially important to situate the time as not created by the university. It was created by the protests against police violence, racism, and death that ruled the nation. Something discernable shifted last year was shifted in the national convention of racial terror and state violence. This was a movement led by black queer feminist organizers in radical liberation trajectories. Although this social shift feels new, given that the majority awareness feels new, this is misleading as the structural conditions are historical. Violence threatening black indigenous communities of color have been here for centuries and the energy, effort, and accountability did not come from our libraries, research labs, or faculty meetings. Institutions are a vital contextual factor for conversation however in the words of Angela Davis, what we think of as anti-racist as an institution--as meant not being racist--is not a statement that holds true.
History
Since the late 1960s, the political struggles in communities of color, working-class communities, have filtered into the campus and become political fights over the campus’s research and teaching landscape. The Third World Liberation Front coalition fought to create a College of Ethnic Studies, now fifty-one years ago, and we hopefully can acknowledge the fraught legacies to keep those intellectual spaces alive, with adequate funding and political support.
Where Ethnic Studies, its constituent programs, and African American Studies led the way, the AC curriculum grew directly out of the fight against South African apartheid and particularly the struggle to remove UC’s financial investments through its pension plans in South African businesses. These efforts, to ‘decolonize the budget’ turned (in the words of the then chair of the Graduate Assembly and now Professor of Education, Pedro Noguera) inward to UC Berkeley, into the fight to desegregate the campus, desegregate the curriculum. The result? The creation of a one-course graduation requirement for all UC Berkeley students to build analyses of race, ethnicity, and culture.
Fast forward into the years of America’s so-called "culture wars" and the high stakes of affirmative action’s repeal, the attack on undocumented communities, the dismantling of bilingual education (otherwise called proposition 209, 227, and 184 in CA), and what was a social justice politics built from global decolonial struggles and local desegregation efforts, became reduced to softer, depoliticized, ‘multicultural studies’ and an evasive maneuver against more radical efforts at mitigating inequality. Diversity replaced equality. A reality that The AC Center and its interventions, aims at directly disrupting: one of which is the Creative Discovery Fellows program.
Acknowledgement of Land and Place
The following statement was developed by the Native American Student Development Office in partnership with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and is a living document.
"We recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo) speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band.
We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefitted, and continues to benefit, from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples."