Contemplation and Festivity: Dispositions for Institutional Ungrading

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.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

Jason A. Heron and Alessandro Rovati’s “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility” is a brilliant provocation for Catholic higher educators stuck in the late modern university’s almost idolatrous love of assessment, grades, prestige, and financial success. Ungrading, as they note, “is far more conducive to creating the community of learners who pursue the truth in love that the Church calls for” (127).

In my three years of employing at least some version of ungrading in a class of nearly 270 students, I have seen the fruits of this approach. Whereas I spent most of my time in the early 2010s arguing with students about the difference between an A and an A- (even when I provided a rather clear rubric), I now am able to talk to students about the art of writing, the texts that we’re reading (and how to read said texts in an sophisticated manner), and why many of these ideas matter for life. It’s changed my relationship with my students, often buffering me from the worst effects of generative AI—since my students know that I’m not giving them an F on a miserable paper, they’re open to failing at least at first. They know that I will be there with them, helping them turn their work into something they’re proud of.

That being said, implementing a class featuring ungrading is rather difficult within the institutional constraints of the late modern college or university. For my students, they often rebel against the freedom of ungrading—because they are not being assessed in the same way as the rest of their classes. My students are excellent sheep: they know how to take an exam, shoot for an A, receive said A, and then be rewarded. They worry when I tell them, “Well, what kind of exam would you want to take?” Or when I tell them I won’t give them a prompt for this essay (because reception of an A in my class requires you to come up with your own prompts), they fret.

My students, in the end, don’t know how to seek the truth for its own sake. They are part of a system of education, which has trained them as workers, who complete tasks and receive a reward for their efforts. They continue to take at least four other classes where traditional grading is in place, and therefore, they have a hard time entering into the slightly more contemplative space of my classroom—they’re addicted to grades. And they lack any sense of the meaning of education outside of the reception of certain credentials that will allow them to be gainfully employed.

In essence, ungrading without some larger cultural changes within an institution will be akin to giving a man with a severely broken leg a dose of Advil. It will ease the suffering, but it won’t fix the underlying problem. Our philosophy of education in the late modern university is dominated by an addiction to speed and accomplishment. I have referred to this in a recent book co-written with my friend Leonardo Franchi (Reimagining the Catholic University with Pieper, Newman, and Dawson) as the frenetic university. The frenetic credentialism of the university is inscribed in the very structures of tenure and promotion of faculty. Our institutions demand that faculty members take required training modules, publish more (especially, in the right places), get more grants, teach more, and serve more. More, more, and more. Faculty members are often so busy that they have no idea what’s happening with their colleagues, rarely finding occasions to contemplate truth together.

Certainly, ungrading can help with this. It can invite us to create at least one alternative space in the college or university governed by a different logic, perhaps one equally uncomfortable to the faculty member and student alike. Such alternative cultures can slowly change the college or university.

But ungrading must be one strategy among many that we employ to offer a robust, meaningful philosophy of Catholic higher education. Two others, perhaps related, include the cultivation of both contemplation and festivity within the classroom.

The contemplative classroom is one, perhaps, that uses screens and slides in severe moderation. In such an environment, the student and teacher take the time to slowly read a text or ponder an idea. In such a space, less is more. This classroom is open to silent pondering. The contemplative educator uses the natural space of campus to his or her advantage. The professor holds office hours while walking on campus or even assigns the students to discussion groups where they are to meet outside or while walking themselves. The contemplative educator encourages dialogue about the material outside of class, rewarding students for holding discussions about the material. When I teach my large class, I require that students host discussion groups about the material with people not in the class including their roommates, friends, and even random people on campus. I want to create a culture where the slow looking at reality is normative. I ask students to go to art museums, look at trees for a lot longer than they’re comfortable with (in a course on sacramental theology, for example), and write by hand. I want them (and me) to slow down.

The other disposition I seek to cultivate in the classroom is festivity. Festivity is linked to contemplation. The festive classroom is marked by a mutual celebration of the goodness of existence. Professors and students alike often think about going to class or grading as a painful activity, one more akin to punishment than joyful gratitude for the opportunity to seek the truth in love. Festivity unfolds in the classroom when the professor is willing to delight in a student’s question or response. The festive classroom is one where there is humor, a recognition that even when we are pondering that which is most serious or salvific, delight can erupt. Irony can manifest, and it can be recognized. At the same time, it’s clear that the educator is also overjoyed with the insights being studied—we are reading this or that text as proposing something essential to the human condition: why shouldn’t we love it? The same goes with grading: professors love to complain about grading. But a mindset change is needed. Grading is a unique opportunity to offer correction but also to delight in the insights of a student. It is a chance to enter into a dialogue of truth, to celebrate the gift of our common work.

Ungrading, of course, is essential to this renewal of Catholic higher education pedagogy—it is attuned, as Heron and Rovati show, to a Catholic theological anthropology. But such ungrading must be practiced in institutional settings where the predominant philosophy of education is dominated not by the monstrous logic of endless consumption and production but contemplation and festivity. Our colleges and universities, if they are Catholic, must be willing to reward this kind of innovative work by professors, refusing to forget that colleges and universities are not first and foremost research factories but spaces for contemplative wonder and delight.

May such a philosophy of truly liberal learning be developed and lived out by courageous institutions in the coming years, especially as higher education participates in processes of self-examination precipitated by generative AI, the demographic cliff, and a crisis of authority where many question whether colleges and universities should exist in the first place. Now is the time for the kind of creative work performed by Heron and Rovati!

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.