Open Education

As an educator involved in shaping the field of open pedagogy, Robin DeRosa, has long been an advocate for alternative grading strategies. In her own classrooms, she has found that “ungrading” has positively impacted the quality of her students’ work and shifted class dynamics in ways that cultivated vitality and collaboration. Over time, this pedagogical shift led Robin to explore how the apparatus of assessment is connected to deeper political and economic forces that constrain our educational ecosystems. In this presentation, Robin will focus both on how her personal trajectory around grading has influenced her thinking about educational systems writ large, and also on how the current moment requires all educators to think critically and creatively about how our pedagogies can reflect, resist, and reshape the contexts within which we teach.

Keynote talk:

• Robin DeRosa, Executive Director, Open Education Network

What are the key issues right now for alternative grading proponents? How can we rebuild and reclaim trust in the classroom and society at large? What is the role of alternative grading in the age of AI? What are the questions and issues that instructors, institutions, students, and staff have to confront in their classes and beyond? Prepare to be challenged and inspired. In this session, two of the most prominent and thoughtful advocates and theorists of alternative grading will give brief and provocative position papers, followed by a conversation about the state of the university and the place of alternative grading today, trading ideas and responding also to questions from the session moderator and the audience at large.

Keynotes:

• Asao Inoue, Author of Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom and Professor in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University
• Jesse Stommel, Author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop Faculty member at the University of Denver and co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy

Moderator: Christina Hendricks, Professor of Teaching in Philosophy, UBC

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