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Futures Initiative

The Futures Initiative aims to advance greater equity and innovation in higher education. Housed at the Graduate Center and reaching throughout the CUNY community, the Futures Initiative empowers the next generation of intellectual leaders with bold, public, and engaged teaching and learning. The Futures Initiative fosters greater understanding of the complexities of the higher education landscape by spearheading qualitative and quantitative research in areas such as academic labor practices and reward systems, open-access multimedia publishing, data visualization and interpretation, and institutional change. Through HASTAC@CUNY (a hub of the online network Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), the Futures Initiative extends its collaborative peer-to-peer practices across institutions, disciplines, national boundaries, and economic and social disparities, promoting reinvestment in higher education as a public good.

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Open Pedagogy (11/11): Ungrading

  • Posted by Claire Cahen on November 2, 2021 at 9:32 am

    Dear Colleagues,

    Greetings from the OpenLab! Please see below for details on our upcoming Open Pedagogy event on Thursday, November 11. Please share this event with your networks.

    You can RSVP by clicking this link and commenting on this post.

    —–

    Open Pedagogy: Ungrading

    *Thursday, November 11, 2021 (Zoom- details below)

    *Please RSVP by commenting on this post. Please share this invitation with your colleagues!

    As higher education continues to demand rigor and productivity from its workers and students, we’re concerned with how institutional policies can better engage the material realities of many in the CUNY community. Difficulties in the classroom are compounded by ongoing investment in a “back-to-normal” paradigm that doesn’t typically address grief, poverty, illness, and exhaustion from demands for productivity. There are no easy answers, especially when so much of the current predicament is outside of our control.

    Ungrading and its accompanying strategies potentially offer one way to mitigate harm. Ungrading is essentially student-centered and student-led, demanding that we engage critically with the power dynamics of the classroom. By incorporating grading policies that center students’ goals, hold space for critical self-reflection, and value the process of learning over a product, we can practice equity in our evaluation criteria.

    In this event we will consider the following questions:

    • Borrowed from Kathleen Alves: Why do teachers grade? How does it feel to be graded? What do you want grading to do for you? Consider as a student and as an instructor.
    • Grading has been criticized for rewarding the performance of knowledge over the process of developing knowledge. What strategies can we use to redirect the focus?
    • Grades have also been shown to reward students who have educational, class, racial/ethnic, and language privilege and penalize students without these resources. How do we as faculty challenge our own racist, ableist beliefs about how students *should* behave and perform?

    Recommended Readings:

    OpenLab at City Tech is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

    Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsdOytpjoiEtdygwZQMPp4fFWIRlHDafcz

    Topic: Open Pedagogy: Ungrading
    Time: Nov 11, 2021 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

    Join Zoom Meeting

    https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81135581883?pwd=eUR3cTBudXMvZ0FtZ2d3ZkVXZXNaZz09

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