Undoing the Grade by Jesse Stommel
Grades and assessment are elephants in almost every room where discussions of education are underway. While I would prefer that grades would crawl back into the hole from which they came, my goal here is not to demonize assessment altogether but to dissect it - to cut right to its jugular: Where does assessment fail? What damage can it do? What can't be assessed? Can we construct more poetic, less objective, models for assessment? In a system structured around standards and gatekeeping, when and how do we stop assessing? The word "ungrading" means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply "not grading." The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices. Ungrading is a systemic critique, a series of conversations we have about grades, ideally drawing students into those conversations with the goal of engaging them as full agents in their own education.This collection represents over 20 years of thinking and writing about grades. The work of ungrading is to ask questions, have hard conversations, point to the fundamental inequities of grades, push for systemic change, and to mitigate or obstruct harm that grading, and grades as a system, do to marginalized students and precarious educators. There are lots of entry points to those conversations.
ISBN: 9798986676425
Publication Date: 2023-08-15