A Risk Worth Taking
Why Ungrading Is the Best Way Forward Amidst Our Educational Challenges
Editor’s Note: This post is a part of a series of responses to “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility” curated by Alessandro Rovati, the Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Theology.
I am grateful to my friend, Alessandro Rovati, for writing with me and for organizing this conversation about our article. Thank you to Megan Heeder, Xavier Montecel, Timothy O’Malley, and Catherine Yanko for your contributions. It has been a joy to talk with some of you in person about these things. I’m happy to extend the conversation here.
My contribution is organized according to Montecel’s important questions about our article. Montecel raises three concerns. First, he wonders how the Christian hypothesis interacts with the religious diversity of our classrooms. Second, he worries about the ungrading workload and the pressure it puts on professors. Finally, he warns that ungrading methods might aid and abet inequities for certain student populations.
1. The Christian Hypothesis and Religious Diversity
Montecel agrees that, if we want to be hospitable to difference, then we need to know who we are. We cannot pretend to be nobody. Each of us comes from a tradition that proposes a vision of the world. But is it reasonable to propose the Christian hypothesis when there are so many competing hypotheses in the contemporary classroom? Is there another starting point for a conversation composed of so many different voices? Heeder’s contribution is helpful here. She draws our attention to the personal nature of education. Teachers and students are not instruments in each other’s hands. Rather, we are persons encountering other persons.
Every semester, I realize again the difference ungrading has made to my personal presence in the classroom. I also encounter the difference it makes to my students’ personal presence. They are used to showing up to their coursework in a passive mode, ready to listen, take notes, study, and then regurgitate. Ungrading methods make this passive mode difficult. So, the students have to be the responsible agents they actually are. But this, in turn, means that I cannot give the same lectures I gave the last time I taught the course. Since I’m dealing with responsible agents, my pedagogy and I must be responsive in return. By illuminating the personal nature of education, ungrading makes it difficult to think I’ve ever mastered a course or that I can just roll in and do what I’ve always done. Instead, ungrading puts me in a position much closer to that of my students: the position of the beginner. I have taught the content before. But I have never taught these students before.
I’m a Benedictine, and Benedictines are self-consciously beginners. So, from my perspective, this posture or style of the beginner is essential in the classroom Montecel describes. When it comes to proposing the Christian hypothesis, students recognize the difference between someone who expects them to capitulate quickly to the hypothesis’s truth and beauty, and someone who is eager to listen to what they might say in response to the hypothesis. The former is not really interested in the risk of education while the latter is attempting to embody the fascination Rovati and I hope for. So, in a classroom composed of diverse perspectives, maintaining the posture or style of the beginner enables me to propose the Christian hypothesis in a way that encourages the students’ own proposals.
2. The Ungrading Workload
Montecel also voices a concern many critics and skeptics have regarding ungrading’s time- and energy-consumption. This question is even more poignant as teachers and students experiment with AI for the sake of greater efficiency at different points in the education process. This desire for efficiency is completely understandable. And it’s a matter of justice when we consider the vulnerable position of adjunct faculty, lecturers, and other teachers who may be overworked and underpaid.
Yanko’s comments provoked me in this regard. I read her contribution in light of Pope Francis’s 2020 New York Times op-ed, “A Crisis Reveals What is in our Hearts.” Francis says that the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to examine who we really are. And if we’re not careful, we will squander the opportunity the crisis presents. The use of AI in teaching and learning presents us with an analogous opportunity to examine who we really are as teachers and students. And what many of us have learned is that we are less interested in fostering the contemplative and festive culture O’Malley calls for, and more interested in getting stuff done. O’Malley rightly notes that ungrading methods in a few classes will not change the “frenetic” culture of higher education. To truly change the frenetic school, O’Malley urges Catholics to create contemplative and festive cultures where teachers and students have the freedom to slow down, savor the beauty of the educational encounter, delight in what we find in that encounter, and celebrate the gift of this way of life.
I appreciate the way ungrading methods can point us toward such a transformation. Grading-as-usual is too much like the dismal culture of the market: I will give you as little of X as you will accept so I can get as much of Y as I can get my hands on. The speed and efficiency of this sort of culture is, apparently, tantalizing. In school, it promises accurate measurement and quick results for both teachers and students. Add AI to this mix, and volunteering for ungrading’s time and effort seems quixotic. From the perspective of the market-grading culture, it makes sense to worry about increased time and effort when it comes to grading. And I will not lie: ungrading methods do require time and effort. Perhaps even “more” time and effort than conventional grading methods. But the “more” here is misleading. It’s more time and effort spent on education, not on the sort of grading many teachers find onerous. O’Malley insists that ungrading needs to exist within a larger culture of contemplation and festivity. I think that’s right. Such a culture would make the anxiety about ungrading’s workload a non-starter. To a teacher working in a contemplative and festive culture, ungrading is a part of pursuing the truth. It’s not an add-on to business as usual. It is an essential part of the teaching.
But even in the frenetic school culture most of us are familiar with, where the ungrading teacher usually works alone, a contemplative and festive culture in the teacher’s own classroom remains possible. This is a way of describing Yanko’s experience of navigating AI with the tools of ungrading. Though no method is perfect, Yanko rightly notes that ungrading works beautifully in our current crisis, where AI is exposing various deficiencies in teaching and learning. Ungrading works beautifully, however, only if we have the courage to do the difficult and risky work it requires. In my own pedagogy, I have begun to describe this hard work in explicitly virtuous terms. The inability and unwillingness to persevere in the pursuit of a difficult good has a name: cowardice. The advent of AI and the possibility of ungrading have clarified just how cowardly my students and I can be. To be sure, being cautious about the ungrading workload is not cowardice. It’s wisdom. But in my experience, mustering the courage to take on this challenge is transformative.
3. Ungrading and Inequity
Montecel notes that there are several populations that struggle with ungrading methods. Neurodivergence, economic precarity, and race and gender inequalities, for example, variously impact teachers’ and students’ ability to participate. But his point is even more precise. Some teachers and students are not free to choose the adventure of education Rovati and I describe. It’s not that they experiment with it and find that they don’t like it, or are too challenged by it. It’s that the exigencies of their lives prevent them from participating at all.
Montecel is right. The vision of education we describe in our article is fraught with risk, and not only the sort of risk that is rhetorically powerful for a couple of professors who want to challenge the status quo. It is also fraught with the risk that our commitments and our methods will be used to silence difference, promote injustice, and foster exclusion. But in my experience, the personal nature of ungrading makes it more likely that I will know about the students who are in these vulnerable positions. Not only that, but I will get to know them, not just as students who need accommodation X, but as responsible persons. I work regularly with students who need my course to be as conventional as possible. Ungrading provides us both with the tools we need to accommodate this need. Over time, I have become more explicit about this early in the semester. “If you need a typical grading method, we can accommodate that.” Those who need it are not left behind or made to feel inferior. They are, rather, empowered to make a choice, which is its own oblique introduction to taking responsibility for their education.
Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.
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