Student Priorities in an Ungraded Class
Plus a student partnership project
This post is part of an ongoing series of reflections completed during my Spring 2023 writing course. While the post is being published in August of 2023, it was originally written on April 14, 2023.
We’re now beyond Easter break, into the home stretch of the semester. We’ve had some interesting conversations about the state of education in the last few weeks after reading Paulo Friere, bell hooks, and Cathy Davidson’s introduction to The New Education. My students are at work on their final major submission (before the portfolios): a proposal assignment that asks them to identify a problem in education and suggest a solution, for an audience who might be able to implement that solution.
Today, I’ll write about the question of how students prioritize classes like this one (i.e., classes with flexible deadlines), along with a students-as-partners project we’re working on in the last few weeks of the semester.
The Question of Priorities
While I do see students progressing in their writing, I’ve had a difficult time keeping them on track in submitting work. This is something I’m planning to ask them about at the end of the semester: “It seems like many of you struggled to submit work on time for this class—what kind of late work policy would encourage you to stay on track without causing undue stress?” I have a feeling they’ll tell me (as a couple already have) that what often slows them down on submitting assignments for my class are the rigid and punitive policies around late work instituted by their other professors. Because of its flexibility, my class is always their last priority.
This is a problem that comes up often in the ungrading community. One thing I hear sometimes in response to it is “So what?” Students lead busy lives, and if we can extend a little grace in the midst of that chaos, we should do it. Why should our classes be students’ first priorities anyway? We should trust them to make those determinations for themselves.
I do agree with this. But I also want to note that many students aren’t making those determinations freely—they often feel like their hands are being forced. I know that, in a more forgiving world, my course would still be last priority for a lot of people. But I don’t think the number would be quite as high as it is at present. And then there’s the problem of my workload, the fact that I have to run down individual students for assignments almost every week. While this sometimes makes me want to throw my hands up and refuse to accept any late work at all, I am a bit too stubborn for that: I won’t allow the inflexibility of others to dictate my course policies.
At the same time, I understand why these inflexible policies are in place. It’s because my colleagues are as frustrated as I am by late work and are too busy to deal with it. Many of them are teaching double, triple, even quadruple the number of students I’m teaching, or more—and that’s just in one class. Some are teaching multiple large lectures. Who has the time to negotiate deadlines with that many people?
There are certainly some things instructors can do to build in flexibility for students, even in large courses. But I think the only real and sustainable solution to this problem is to give instructors more time. We need to create policies, teaching practices, and spaces that work for the students we actually have—not the students we used to have, wish we had, or think we ought to have. And developing and implementing new things (especially new mindsets) takes time. I think that if teachers had more breathing room, both in designing and in teaching their courses, they would be able to create more breathing room for their students. We need to keep pushing for this in higher ed.
Until then, we’re all doing the best we can!
Writing with Students as Partners
On a lighter note, I’m excited about a final project I’m working on with a couple of excellent students. I actually gave the class two options for their final major assignment: they could work on the proposal I mentioned above or they could collaborate with me on a piece of public writing that discusses some of the innovative things we’ve done in the class this semester: ungrading and working with generative AI. The idea is that when we’re done, we’ll actually pitch this piece to an external venue. I thought this would be a great opportunity for students to get some authentic experience in researching and writing for a real audience.
When I introduced this idea to the class, I made sure to inform them that it might be a messier process than their other writing assignments. Co-writing is difficult, often unfolding in unpredictable ways, and the timelines are more uncertain. We would have to interact with editors and would be working on the schedule of the publication venue rather than the schedule of the semester. Students would have to be prepared to make revisions or edit our work on whatever amount of notice editors requested. I asked any student who was okay with this and still wanted to participate to send me an email stating why they wanted to work on this project, what topic(s) they wanted to write on, and what they thought they would be able to contribute to the piece.
Two students expressed interest, and we’ve already met twice to get started. At our first meeting, we settled on a focus area: the piece will be about why ungrading (broadly defined) is necessary in the age of AI and will draw on our collective experience in this class. We also started a brainstorming document, where each of us wrote notes and pasted links to relevant recent work that might inform our ideas. At our second meeting, we distilled this information into an outline and divvied up some writing tasks. We’re meeting again next week to put our writing together, refine it, and think about an introduction and conclusion for the piece.
Possibly by the time you’re reading this our piece will be published! And possibly not, of course.1 This is not owing to any deficit in the students: they are both extremely thoughtful and dedicated writers. But I know from experience that it’s difficult to get published. If we don’t find a home for the piece elsewhere, I’ll publish it here.
I like this project for several reasons. The most evident benefit is the one I mentioned above. It’s an authentic assessment, meaning it asks students to apply what they’ve learned to a “real-world” task that is meaningful outside the classroom, one that is actually faced by professional (or semi-professional) writers and one that has real stakes beyond the final course grade. The task also asks students to reflect on their experiences in learning to write this semester (building skills in metacognition) and to translate those experiences into narratives and arguments that might be useful for someone else.
But the main reason I like it is as an example of how we might work with students as partners in improving higher ed. Student partnership has been a big topic in educational development recently, as teaching centers explore new ways of bringing undergraduates into their work. Many of these efforts take the form of partnership programs like the Students as Learners and Teachers program facilitated by Alison Cook-Sather at Bryn Mawr or the Inclusive Pedagogy Partnership I co-piloted in 2020-21 at the University of Notre Dame. In these programs, students work with faculty as teaching consultants, drawing on their expertise as learners. Their interactions with faculty may be short-term or long-term, but the key idea is that the two groups work in partnership to enhance teaching and learning.
These programs are vital to creating a higher ed that works for all of us. But instructors don’t have to wait on teaching-center-driven programs to begin working with students as partners in their courses. They can start by co-creating learning experiences, inviting students to contribute to class policy-making, course design, or assessment. And they can do it through projects, like the one above, that engage students as expert learners and collaborators in efforts to improve our teaching practices, individually or collectively.
And to get back to the subject at hand: I probably wouldn’t have been comfortable doing an assignment like this in a traditionally-graded class. There would be concerns like: how do I grade this? What would a rubric even look like? How do I ensure “fairness” with the other students? Does it “count” if they are co-writing? Does it “count” if I’m helping them write? What if they never learn how to properly punctuate an MLA citation? Leaving these concerns behind allows me to engage students in work that is more beneficial for all of us, regardless of whether or not our piece is eventually published.
Stay tuned for more on this piece and on the final weeks of my course, in which students will focus their efforts entirely on revision.
At the time this post is being released, the piece is still not publicly available. But I am hoping it will be available soon, either here or elsewhere.