Ungrading inspects the inequities of schooling, asks hard questions of the structures of our schools, and offers a critique of the labor conditions for teachers at all levels of education.| Jesse Stommel
Ungrading is an equitable practice because grades do harm. And marginalized students are the ones most harmed by grades. Finding ways to reduce that harm is imperative if equity or justice is our goal.| Jesse Stommel
For ungrading to be equitable, we can’t merely ask students to grade themselves, but must work together with students to interrogate and dismantle grades as a system.| Jesse Stommel
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 the harm of grading.| Jesse Stommel
What is Ungrading? 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.| Jesse Stommel
The biggest cruelty of grades as a system is that they frustrate the already tenuous relationships between students and teachers, and between teachers and their institutions.| Jesse Stommel
Resilient pedagogy means acknowledging that not all students will be able to meet us exactly where our institutions expect them to, and teachers won’t always be able to meet students exactly there either.| Jesse Stommel
How must we approach our pedagogies differently in the face of the increasing precarity of both faculty members and students?| Jesse Stommel
Best practices, which aim to standardize teaching and flatten the differences between students, are anathema to pedagogy.| Jesse Stommel
What we are facing right now will have an effect on education that lasts years (or longer), and it’s exposing inequities and systemic injustices that many students have faced all along.| Jesse Stommel
Educational institutions are spaces for learning, but more specifically, they are spaces for social learning. And so our role as educators and administrators of educational institutions has to be focused on building community in addition to offering courses, designing curriculum, and credentialing.| Jesse Stommel
Our work as educators is not just to question ubiquitous practices, compulsory data collection, and algorithmic decision-making, but also to model what it looks like to think critically about the whens, whys, and hows of technology.| Jesse Stommel
Grades (and institutional rankings) are currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction. Grading is a massive co-ordinated effort to take humans out of the educational process.| Jesse Stommel
Even a system that invites subversiveness, like Domain of One's Own, can't single-handedly dismantle the institutionalized hierarchies of education.| Jesse Stommel
Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept being graded, and none of us spend enough time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades.| Jesse Stommel
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.| Jesse Stommel
There is nothing ideologically neutral about grades, and there is nothing ideologically neutral about the idea that we can neat and tidily do away with grades.| Jesse Stommel
Ungrading is not as simple as just removing grades. The word "ungrading" (an active present participle) suggests that we need to do intentional, critical work to dismantle traditional and standardized approaches to assessment.| Jesse Stommel
