Research Spotlight: Ungrading, Asset-based Approaches, and Student Agency
Two recent pieces on avoiding deficit-based mindsets
Today, I’m considering two recent pieces that examine the relationship between ungrading and asset-/deficit-based approaches to our classrooms:
Pai, G., Corby, J., Kras, N., Podlucká, D., & Yamamura, M. (2023). The Dialectic Transformation of Teaching and Learning in Community Colleges through Ungrading. Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts 1(2), 117-26. https://zeal.kings.edu/zeal/article/view/28/22
Sorensen-Unruh, C. (2024). The ungrading learning theory we have is not the ungrading learning theory we need. CBE Life Sciences Education, 23(3), es6. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.24-01-0031
For the first group of authors, all faculty in the CUNY system, ungrading is a way to “debunk a deficits-based, outcomes-focused perspective that is pervasive in studies on and of community college students” (117). These students, of course, encounter many barriers to earning a degree: they are more likely to be members of historically marginalized groups, to fall into lower socio-economic brackets, to work part- or full-time outside of school, to commute to school, etc.
Because our systems were not designed to support these roles and identities, students occupying them face a number of challenges. Even when recognizing these barriers, however, research studies and policy proposals focused on the success of community college students often emphasize a lack of motivation, engagement, and self-regulation in this population. This, the authors argue, constitutes a deficit-based approach that not only perpetuates stigma but also “cast[s] community college students at large as problems to be solved through programs and interventions” (118).
In search of a teaching approach that would start from an asset-based lens, the authors chose to “ungrade” their courses. Their goals were, among other things, to shift the focus of their classes from evaluative outcomes to the learning process; de-center the instructor’s role in assessment; and to “emphasize teaching and learning as a social and collaborative process of interactionally constructing knowledge within the learning community of a class” (119).
In a series of courses across disciplines, these instructors incorporated elements of student agency and self-assessment, metacognitive exercises, authentic assignments, and opportunities for students to revise their work based on peer and instructor feedback. While they encountered challenges along the way, both students and instructors had generally positive experiences with ungrading. In particular, they found that it empowered students to take ownership of their learning in new ways.
“It was rewarding to see that, when ungrading is undergirded by a philosophy viewing teaching and learning as a collaborative process, students recognized it as a liberating and agentic practice” (122).
For these authors, ungrading provided a way to promote asset-based rather than deficit-based approaches to students—which is especially important in a community-college context.
For Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, however, ungrading is not inherently asset-based. Sorensen-Unruh is an ungrading advocate and Chemistry faculty at Central New Mexico Community College. Her article in CBE Life Sciences Education argues that one of the major theories that undergirds ungrading in the literature is self-regulated learning—a concept that is sometimes associated with a deficit-based approach to students.
Sorensen-Unruh defines “self-regulated learning” (SRL) as a “learning theory that describes all the skills, processes, etc. needed to be able to learn on one’s own when given learning objectives and assessed on the depth of learning by an instructor” (4). So far, so good. Because ungrading tends to encourage student ownership over learning, SRL is often invoked in literature about alternative grading practices.
But Sorensen-Unruh points out, like the CUNY authors above, that many discussions of SRL promote a deficit-based mindset. Instructors frequently blame students for not already having the skills they need to learn effectively when they enter college. When we attempt to teach SRL skills to correct this “deficit,” we might make incorrect assumptions about the skills students actually need/want or fail to recognize and build on the strengths students already possess. One surprising example from my own experience this semester: I’ve talked to more than one instructor who attributed student underperformance in their classes to poor note-taking practices only to discover, upon further examination, that students were taking notes in ways that were working for them, and the disconnect lay elsewhere.
As some Freirian-influenced critics have argued, emphasizing SRL skills can also teach students to conform themselves to, and optimize their productivity within, an existing neoliberal order rather than prompting them to critically question and transform that order. Teaching SRL too often means providing students with the homogenized self-regulation scripts that we find acceptable and coaching them to rely on teachers to provide these scripts.
Because of these associations, Sorensen-Unruh argues that SRL is “not a suitable learning theory for ungrading” and can contradict its emancipatory aims (3). She proposes instead that we employ two different theoretical frameworks in conjunction with ungrading: funds of knowledge (FK) and community cultural wealth. In combination, these frameworks cede power to students and center the strengths they bring to the classroom from their own backgrounds and communities.
“FK, with its focus on integrating each student’s prior knowledge and familial and cultural experiences into the classroom, coupled with community cultural wealth, which explicitly focuses on reframing power dynamics using critical race theory as its basis, combined might produce a theory to describe students’ learning best within ungrading classrooms” (7).
I appreciated the emphasis that both of these articles place on student agency, something I’m always trying to promote in my classroom. In a particularly illuminating workshop conducted by Lindsay Masland a few years ago, I discovered that agency was one of my core values as an educator. It’s this value that made me adopt ungrading in the first place, and I don’t think anyone could implement ungrading successfully without some level of emphasis on student agency.
It’s good to be reminded, though, that when we cede power to students or ask them to exercise their own agency, we have to…actually let them do that. While I want students to develop as independent thinkers and learners, I sometimes find myself troubled when they don’t become the kind of thinkers and learners I want them to be. Or I find myself trying to “fix” students in ways I think will benefit them.
There’s a fine line here: I do want my students to develop the kind of learning skills they need to succeed in subsequent classes or careers. But I want them to develop in ways that they want to be developed—not to squish themselves into the molds that I, their other professors, their parents, their bosses, their friends, or society at large hold out for them. I want them to make intentional choices about what, why, and how they learn.
While some students make choices I wouldn’t make, that’s not the hardest part of this process. The hardest part is that many students, when offered some level educational agency for the first time in their lives, dislike it or don’t really know what to do with it. I do try to provide structured paths for students who might, for a variety of reasons, lack the bandwidth to be fully intentional in making choices about their learning in the course. But I’m troubled by the fact that some students spend the entire semester looking for ways to put their agency back in my hands.
I’m choosing to believe, however, that agency, like any other skill we teach, requires practice. The more we give students opportunities to practice it, the better they’ll get. And the more we resist deficit-based thinking about students, the better off we’ll all be.