Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today, on episode number 483 of the Teaching In Higher Ed podcast. Undoing the grade, why we grade, and how to stop with Jesse Stommel. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonnie Stachowiak And this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Jesse Stommel joins me once again on Teaching in Higher Ed for today’s conversation. Jesse Stommel is a faculty member in the writing program at University of Denver. He’s also cofounder of hybrid pedagogy, the journal of critical digital pedagogy and digital pedagogy lab. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He’s the co author of an urgency of teachers, the work of critical digital pedagogy. Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, digital Studies and composition. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, a clever cat, lokai, and a badass daughter Hazel. Jesse Stommel, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jesse Stommel [00:01:48]:

Hi. It’s so good to be with you again.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:50]:

You sent me a direct message on a platform that is confused about its name. And I couldn’t read the message when I clicked on the link to go and see why it was that you were contacting me. I just knew you were asking or sharing something with me And I just thought, well, whatever it is that you have to share or do or propose, I am so in for it. So I I was excited that we get to have this conversation about a recent work, but knowing you and I, it’s gonna be a conversation about so much more. So welcome back. It’s been since July of 2020 since we last spoke.

Jesse Stommel [00:02:23]:

Yeah. I couldn’t believe that. And, honestly, when I sent you that message, I was saying, hey. I’d love to chat with you on your show again, but, truthfully, it was also just let me just slide into your DMs and see what’s up. See what’s going on.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:37]:

Yeah. It’s harder and harder to slide into people’s hands if —

Jesse Stommel [00:02:40]:

I know. Indeed.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:41]:

Like, it’s a pretty basic thing that when you get that email, you should be able to view it and no. No. No. No. No. No. No. So we’re — Well,

Jesse Stommel [00:02:48]:

it’s also fascinating that the new platforms, the new version of the thing that is doesn’t necessarily have a name currently. The new versions of that, some of them don’t have DMs. So there’s Bonni be a kind of reorientation because I know that you and I I think a lot of our conversations has happened in DMs on that platform. So where are we Bonni continue having that conversation? I’m glad I reached out to you because if it just suddenly goes away, I wouldn’t actually know how to get in touch with you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:15]:

Yeah. And same back here. I looked. I thought for sure I had an email address for you. Nope. No. No. No. So we have really this has been a fabric of our of our connections and for so many, of course, in this world. So we’re gonna start out with, I just recently was reminded, by you, is called a prefix I’m I’m going back to, you know, elementary school grammar and getting a refresher from Jesse is called a prefix. I Bonni first just talk about the prefix on. What does undo to words, to ideas, to anything that comes to your mind?

Jesse Stommel [00:03:50]:

To me, when I think of when I put the prefix un in front of something. To me, it suggests an active undoing of that thing. So it isn’t the reverse of that thing. It is instead a dismantling of that thing. And to me, it often means a dismantling of both that thing practically, but also a dismantling of that thing from a philosophical standpoint because I think there’s a linguistic work that the prefix Bonni is doing. So it’s forcing us to look at that thing, re examine that thing, both the cality of the thing, but also the word itself and how that word makes meaning.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:24]:

I’m realizing that the word, or sorry, the prefix, This is often associated with ungrading, which we are, of course, Bonni be talking about a lot today. Before we do that, I’m I also associate un in my imagination, things I’m curious about, unlearning. And I, as you were saying, how you think about that prefix, I was realizing that perhaps my thoughts and and curiosity around unlearning perhaps treats that as if it is the opposite of learning. But as you were saying that, I’m realizing it is in fact not. What comes to your mind as you think about something that you have needed to unlearn in your life or that you have witnessed and observed others needing to unlearn in their lives.

Jesse Stommel [00:05:11]:

Yeah. I’m thinking about I mean, even if I think about the word unlearning and thinking about how how un is working in that word. Unlearning to me suggests a very deep kind of learning. It’s a very deep kind of learning a questioning about how how we came to know what we know and also a questioning of how learning happens. So there’s kind of a meta level reflectiveness going on when we’re earning a word, like, unlearning. For me, unlearning, I think one of the biggest things I’ve been thinking about lately is I have been an academic in some form for, I mean, essentially all of my adult life. I’ve never left college. I was in I started college when I was in, 1994 did my undergraduate. And then I actually, I did take off 1 year between undergraduate and my master’s Kroeger, and I work at borders in Madison, Wisconsin. I worked at a bookstore. So even working at the bookstore, it felt and my job felt very academic because I worked the information desk and it was it was an awesome job because I felt a bit like a library and helping people, like, figure out who they were by determining what what book they would I had borders. And at that time, borders was still kinda scrappy and very independent. And so it was a cool it was a cool place to work, but then I immediately went into master’s Kroeger, then I went into a pH then I started teaching while I was in my PhD. I was teaching at multiple different colleges. And here I am something like a 23rd year senior or something like that. And so the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how that development for me has so entrenched me in the culture of academia and the culture higher education that even me, someone who pushes back on a lot of that is sort of a lot of the cultural norms inside academia, I’m still steeped in it. To me, what I’ve been trying to do in recent years is really unlearn my own schooling. And and by schooling, I mean, capital s schooling, not my education, not my learning, but to unlearn the processes that have made me who I am and And part of that is coming right now because my daughter is six years old. She’s starting 1st grade. So I’m watching directly what it happens when we start to be schooled, capital s schooled. And thinking about the way that us as when if we’re academics, if we got PhDs, if we got master’s degrees, if we’ve been teaching in higher education, we are more capital s schooled than any people on the planet. And so for us to be talking about something like unlearning or ungrading, there’s an irony in that because we are the people who are who need to do that work the most and the people for whom that work is probably the hardest.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:44]:

I so appreciate that you’ve Bonni transparent in that way. Sometimes when I speak with you, I hold you in such high esteem which I think is good. But where I I think that’s not good is when that gets the that happens in my brain is when I think parts of me are bad. You know, and so I it often comes up of a feel of shame and guilt that I didn’t figure it out as quick as you figured it out, which, of course, it’s like that guy who wrote became famous. I mean, other people did this, but there was that guy. I think he was German who wrote his CV of failures. And that thing spread like wildfire because that’s just not a look at people’s lives. So I have not had the opportunity to get to as much here from you because you’re you’re so much further having attempted to undo certain things. And if and and so, anyway, I I I But I also like that I know you well enough to know that I can be vulnerable. And actually if I am vulnerable with you, then other people really appreciate that too. They appreciate that I’m willing to put myself out there. So I will say what I am ashamed about that I didn’t figure out sooner was coming into higher education. I’ve been, in this context for about 20 years now. And I just remember hearing things that were spoke about, not in very concrete ways, but that, like, I just I didn’t question it. And why why didn’t I question? So things like, great inflation, horrendous, awful, terrible. And, I mean, and then or or I’d like that you have to follow rules. I taught as an adjunct. I didn’t teach there long, by the way, because I couldn’t stand it, but they do the common thing that I know you’ve written about and spoke about where I had to assign a certain percentage of grades as a’s and a certain person they had they had it all as part if you wanted to work there, you had to do that. Now, again, didn’t last long, and I’m coming from a privileged place where I’m now fully tenured professor I’ve been at this a long time. I don’t have the precarity. And I now have tenure, which has some where I can I can now more boldly ask questions to get at these things? But anyway, I don’t so I wonder if there are things that you think about where other people have just, you know, where where what do we need to undo? What do we need to unlearn? What what critical questions should we be asking about before we could ever attempt something akin to the ungrading movement and some of the practices that are talked about there.

Jesse Stommel [00:10:15]:

Yeah. I mean, I often I mean, my answer to that question might be that grades are the things the thing that we’ve most taken for granted in education more broadly. And the thing that is the thorn in our side as we’re trying to do this work, but I think there’s precursors to doing that work. And I think a good example is this issue of precarity? How do we even make decisions about what we can and cannot do in our institutions? If we can’t answer that question, we’re not gonna be able to do the work of ungrading. I mean, interesting for me, if I call it ungrading or whatever I call it, I’ve been doing some version of alternative grading since I started teaching, but it wasn’t I wasn’t somehow magically doing it right on the first day that I started doing it. I was fumbling towards something the entire time. To the point where, you know, I think the most radical transformation in my approach to how I did grading actually happened in 2020 during the pandemic. At the very beginning of the pandemic. That was the sort of the most the biggest leap for me. So even if I started somewhere, It was constantly a journey. And part of that journey and what that journey looked like was driven by my precarity through most of my career. I have been 10 year track. I have been in in advanced promoted positions at institutions. I’ve been in positions that were pretty secure But for most of my 23 years, I’ve been in pretty insecure positions, whether it was an as an adjunct, whether it was on a year to year contract, And I think that has driven a lot of my decision making, and it has also driven a lot of how I’ve presented my work to others. For example, if you look at what Jesse was doing publicly prior to 2010, 2011, you won’t find anything. You won’t find any public work published by Jesse. So that means the 1st 11, 12 years of my teaching career almost were silent. And in part, we’re silent because of pretty deep precarity. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing that work. It was that I didn’t feel like I could talk about it at the time. And what does that look like for someone who is asking themselves questions for the first time within a precarious position, it might mean that it also takes them 10 years. I hope it doesn’t. I hope that work like you do work like I do this kind of public work lets people find their way into this work more quickly than I did. The other thing I would say is that something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is about how do we make decisions about where we draw lines. So, certainly, we have to moves slowly if when we’re we’re in precarious positions. Certainly, all of pedagogical work is about at certain times moving quickly and at certain times moving slowly, but I think there’s also lines we need to draw. And I’ve been thinking about civil disobedience and the work of Henry David Thoreau and the work of, you know, a lot of different work that has been about, well, how do we actually make decisions that now is the time and we can’t continue to do this. And I think that that’s something that I wish I had been able to do earlier in my career start to draw those lines and say this is a line I will not cross. I will not give 70% of my students lower than an a. And I’ve and and so that’s what I I that’s what I want people to get to close more quickly, not necessarily the same decisions I would come to, but at least the ability to ask that question. What matters so much to me? How do I need to support students. How do I need to mitigate harm to do to the that’s done to them? And what is the line that I have to draw?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:34]:

I’m hearing 2 themes and what you shared. One is just this idea that there are there’s the process of unlearning, which you have reminded us in the way that you think about that that idea is not the opposite of whatever the other word is. We’ve been talking about individual twice. So individually, where do I draw the line and and wanting to know that what that definition is? You spoke about going slowly. So I I I’m thinking about the individual choices and then also the collective choices. Part of what is hard for me as I continue to fumble towards something that looks like alternative grading is that it is very challenging to get people to trust you because you are not just you. You are an amalgamation of snap shots of all these different educators that they’ve that they’ve encountered and not even just educators. I was told when I first started teaching, I was really I’m not proud of that person. It was pretty rigid, Jesse. You would not be proud of her either. Actually, you would because I fumbled towards something. Right? But so someone who tells me that they that I remind them a lot of their mom, and they have a very, very difficult relationship with their mom. That to me is an informative in terms of I I am both having a relationship with you as a student, but I’m also representative. You don’t know me really well enough at that point in your 1st year at college, you know, early in the semester that some of the friction that this young man was experiencing wasn’t toward me. He was toward his mom. I mean, like, it’s just, like, so classic that kind of thing. So what’s coming to your mind as far as the individual versus the collective and also adding on to the collective that we are not just this person’s teacher We are often lots of different ideas of what teachers are, and it’s hard to unlearn that stuff because these systems broken, as you said, in terms of your capital letter schooling.

Jesse Stommel [00:15:36]:

Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, oftentimes, when I’m making a critique, at 98% of the time, it’s a structural critique. I do think it’s important for us to take responsibility for what we can own, what we have power over, where we have agency, where we can make change, where we can make a difference. But, ultimately, a huge part of that is looking at the structures that we work within and saying, well, what are the giant hurdles that I have to get over first before I can even own my little piece of this? And I think one of the things when we’re talking about us as Amalgam, so we’re talking about the collective, the collective makes it sound so joyful. Like, you and us as collaborators doing this work together, but oftentimes it’s our institution that we’re standing in for. And our institution has and this isn’t to say that institutions are bad educational institutions are are are are necessarily bad. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are both good and bad in various different ways. But we stand in for something that looks very different from us and that functions very different from us. So when we’re engaging with students in a classroom, we’re also standing in for the institution in some ways. And we can, you know, I often say that I see myself as a teacher as standing in the gap between the institution and the student that part of my role is to translate and also to mitigate harm that the institution might do to students, but also help translate what the goal of the institution is through me to the student and making it personal for them. And making it personal for me. But I think that there’s also a way in which the institution it’s hard for me to I’ve been so thoroughly institutionalized to go back to where we started that it’s hard for me sometimes to stand in that gap unless it’s done extraordinarily act and then going back to the prefix on, that means that at every point, I’m thinking about the thing and rethinking the thing. So if we think about something like ungrading, I can’t just imagine that grades don’t exist in my classroom. The work of ungrading is about recognizing probably even more that a than an average teacher would that grades exist and grades impact me, impact my relationship to students, impact the students, So in some ways, the danger is in decentering grades, I have to center them a little bit for us to talk about them and break them down as part of that. So the it’s always a tenuous line between, okay, I’ve gotta center them so we can talk about them and look at them, but I’ve also gotta make sure that they don’t stay there and control everything that we’re doing and all the relationships that we have.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:08]:

In reading your work and getting to hear you speak at so many different events and and and such and also the conversations I treasure from this podcast. I I know that, and you just said it a moment ago, you were talking about. There’s there’s not one way to do some of the things that we’re about to talk about. There just isn’t. I Woolf hope we would all be thinking of ourselves as continuing to fumble toward things that we are not done. We are still works in progress. That being said, I’d like to tell a quick vignette from when I was getting my doctorate And I’d like to get your response to it of what it does and perhaps does not tell us about alternative means for grading. One of the big challenges that we haven’t really spoke about has to do with motivation. What would it look like in human beings’ motivation were we to not have this supposed carrot there. I do believe that looks differently for different populations. So I’m about to speak about a doctoral experience, which is gonna be an entirely different set of motivations and curiosities. And, this is a curious group that gets to that level of their education that may not be as relevant to if you’re teaching eighteen year olds that just recently graduated from high school. But all this being said, so that I was very motivated. I had professor 2 or 3 times very motivated. He’s he’s very well known for his transformative ability to just really facilitate. I learned a lot about facilitation. I learned a lot about myself. But how he would grade he was he was essentially a leadership consultant, so he would have his paid administrative assistant basically just checked Bonni. We either did things or we did not. I was incredibly motivated in that class. I spent. I read every word of every book that he assigned. I gave everything that I could into every assignment. And I’m not angry at him for this, Jesse, but I don’t think he probably ever read a word. And, again, not angry. I mean, here, I’m a very self directed learner. I’m in getting a doctor. So, I mean, there’s There’s a lot of qualities you might be able to assume, but I I also think, like, I think sometimes people hear about alternative grading. And this groundswell of movement, and they think that’s what it means is somebody else that you checked a box or maybe I checked my own boxes or that kind of thing. So wanted to share that reflection with you and and and get your response to that. And again, but but but also prefacing it by saying, There is no right way to do this, but and nor was he espousing any sort of alternative grading methods. That was just how he did his job.

Jesse Stommel [00:20:36]:

I think I, you know, I wanna talk about the right, no right way to do this, but I also wanna talk about there’s something that came up in what you were saying about extrinsic motivation and you you taught you mentioned carrots. And I one thing that I often think is that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation get held up against one another as though they’re polar opposites that live on different planets when human beings are complicated, which means any given thing that we do, we might simultaneously have both extrins and intrinsic motivation. And I don’t think there is anything like pure intrinsic motivation. Their intrinsic motivation is always late with extrinsic motivation, especially in a place like a school. And so oftentimes when I write about intrinsic motivation and developing and fostering intrinsic motivation, Sometimes folks read that as somehow me imagining that I Woolf, at the same time, get rid of extrinsic motivation. And that, you know, I’ve actually had tweak my writing style a little bit so that it’s very clear I’m talking about developing additional refocusing on using language that isn’t putting intrinsic at odds with one another. And a part of it for me, I always just took for granted. Of course, there’s Bonni continue being extrinsic motivation. We can’t just snap our fingers and do away with that. The same thing when we’re talking about something like alternative grading. Alternatively grading suggests that there’s a a fixed set of things that we that is the standard that we’re pushing back against when when the truth is there’s a lot of different standards that we’re in conversation with when we’re doing something like alternative grading. To to talk about the thing is is there a right way of doing? In some ways, I guess. And I wonder and and maybe I’m just gonna push on this and have us talk about it for a moment. Oftentimes I think that the that the only wrong way to do something is to do it unintentionally is to do it in a way that isn’t carefully thinking through what we’re doing. I think even something like right and wrong get set up against one another and, ultimately get confused because our conversation started with the idea that I wasn’t doing everything right at the beginning. I was doing a whole bunch of things wrong, and that was actually part of my pathway. My continuing path. And even in this moment saying, you know, talking about how in 2020, I I changed my grading system more than at any other point. Now it’s partly because at that moment, I I asked myself, maybe I have been doing some of this wrong up until this point. And so I think that ultimately, I think I wanna make sure that we’re not demonizing wrong as part of a process towards developing our pedagogies. And also that we’re not holding up right, and I think we’ve already been doing this as as the the notion that there’s that there’s one right that we’re trying to that we’re trying to achieve. Instead, I think fumbling towards pedagogy is ultimately the goal. Two things though I think that are just categorically I Woolf I and I’d say they’re both wrong and they’re also harmful is if we are hurting students in some way and we’re not making attempts to mitigate that hurt or if we’re allowing our in our institutions to do harm without at least pushing back where we can given our precarity, where we’re able. And then the other thing I would say is just when our pedagogies are just unconsidered altogether, And for me, I’ve often thought, is that even pedagogy? Can you have a bad pedagogy? Because isn’t within the word pedagogy itself, a careful consideration of what we’re doing. It isn’t it isn’t a pedagogical act to teach without some sort of a considerate careful consideration of what we’re doing and how we’re doing that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:06]:

Well, those two things can take us a long way. They can take us a long way. I’m thinking about I have you have you been hurt by grades in your life?

Jesse Stommel [00:24:14]:

Absolutely. Like, I some of my my the the memories of my education that are most kind of burned into my brain are around grades. One of the examples is a a teacher, and this was in graduate school, actually. I I worked on a project for that teacher. And I had talked about the pro project with that teacher several times, and the assignment had a particular set of instructions And I didn’t go to that teacher and say, I’m not gonna follow the instructions. I’m gonna do this other thing. So I wasn’t super clear But I was this is what I’m planning to do. I expressed it clearly, and I never was told, no, you can’t do that. And then I comp completed the assignment, the activity, And I actually spent more time on that assignment than any other assignment in my entire college career. So it’s the thing I put myself into the most, and it was the thing I felt like I owned the most. Like, this is mine. This is something I’m making for me. And the teacher accepted it. We all displayed our work to everybody. We all talked about it, and I ended up getting an a. And then a couple weeks later, My grades suddenly mysteriously changed on my transcript. And the grade for the course changed to an a minus. And I was like, what happened here? And then I got feedback on the assignment, and I had gotten a b plus. And all of these are grades that, like, ultimately, none of this matters. A b plus and a minus and a To me, it was the change. And then it was also the specific comments that were given to me was essentially, oh, you didn’t write enough words. You didn’t follow the instructions. Was the response that I got back from the teacher, and it really devastated me. And I wrote to the teacher, and I normally wouldn’t do this. I, you know, as as outspoken I, as I am, I don’t really push back directly on authority very well or very often wrote to the teacher and I said, this is what I was trying to do, and this is how much of myself I put into this And here’s why I constructed this the way that I did. And the teacher said, basically, you didn’t follow the instructions. And I just I was so shut down by this. This this specific teacher was I was planning to have this teacher be the director of my dissertation So this one thing that happened ended up changing my entire. I had a completely different focus for my dissertation different committee altogether because this so it so affected me. And ultimately, it was feeling like a rug got pulled out from under me. And feeling like who I was was less important than whether I could follow instructions. I did almost drop out of my program altogether, I I I went and I spent a year getting trained to be a yoga instructor. For a year and just kinda dragged my feet. I was still in my PhD program, but I kinda dragged my feet on proposing my dissertation and I just went really slow through that phase because I was just like, I don’t know if this is what I wanna do with my life anymore. So it was a real it was a real moment for me where I was forced asked myself like, what is this all about? And I came out of that. I know a lot of people feel so shut down by that that they never come back out of it. That they do end up leaving their education or they do end up just deciding to conform utterly to what the expectations are. I ended up deciding if I’m gonna keep doing this, I’m gonna do it for me. And I wish that everybody felt like they were in a position to make that kind of decision. And I didn’t make it every day. You know, there were lots of moments where I conformed but it did kind of force me to ask myself if I’m gonna con continue doing this. Who am I doing it for?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:49]:

Your second list of in your criteria is around Pedagogy being unconsidered altogether. And as I contemplate, the last time you and I had a chance to speak. I mean, so much so much has changed. And, of course, a big thing is about artificial intelligence. I’m sure we could have a lot of conversation around that. But It’s definitely attached to grading in my mind. In the I mean, and and grading is it’s so much of it does come back to the sense of identity that we have, what does it mean to be a teacher? And therefore, when we start talking about pedagogy, what does it mean to teach. Thoughts that you have, and this is a totally unfair question for me to ask because we could spend so long talking about, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. Thoughts that you have around the intersection of the undoing that the idea that such a thing exists with all of its opportunities in perils in mysterious ways for most people. I mean, it’s just that that that coupled with a global pandemic. I mean, How how do we come back to, I guess? I guess I I love this simple list, but not simple at all. Right? So so how do we consider grading When there is such a thing that makes things so easy, but also not easy all at the same time.

Jesse Stommel [00:29:08]:

Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking about the fact that when I was writing the intro to my recent book, it ended up including a long sort of a side about cheating in the introduction rather than putting cheating in a layer later chapter, I put it right up front. And in some ways, because I feel like it’s an elephant in the room and we’re talking about grades, how people feel about cheating, the conversations that we have about cheating, how even the word cheating suggests something about the relation chip between students and cheaters. Students and teachers. That’s an interesting Freudian slip there. But that the relationship between students and teachers are kind of, in some ways, controlled by the narrative and the conversation that we have about cheating And in some ways, I think that the conversation about AI and artificial intelligence is a red herring that ultimately we have to ask ourselves, what is this conversation really about? Because we’ve had that conversation before, like the invention of the learning management system, the year of the mooq, all of these moments in the history of education, we can go back to the invention of the radio lecture, the invention of correspondence courses sent by videotape. All of these moments were different things were happening in education. That forced us to ask questions. I think ultimately about what education is for. So when I think about something like the conversation around artificial intelligence, what’s really happening is we’re being forced to sort of reassess what is education for and also what is what is the role of a teacher? How do we function in relationship to students? And so I think that that the conversation around cheating becomes one of those things that we can’t really talk about grades unless we put cheating on the table, partly because people have so much emotion wrapped up. In cheating with good reason because we put a lot of our self into our work, and it hurts personally when we feel like there’s an affront to that work, whether the affront is happening from from a student or we perceive it as coming from a student, or whether we perceive it as coming from a company that is developing a tool that is going to just radically and fundamentally change our work. It feels like an attack on that work. And so I think that ultimately that’s what I would say. It’s a hue. We could, again, we could probably have a whole conversation about AI But I’ll ultimately, when we’re in those conversations, I think we need to ask ourselves what’s what’s this conversation really about. And the same is true when we’re talking about grades. Grades are never about grades. Grades are about all manner of different things like what’s contained inside that story. I told about the harm that was done by that teacher. What’s that really about? To me, that’s partly about what is education for. It’s partly about power and control within our institutions of education. And so it’s and it’s probably also about precarity, both precarity of me as a student and also probably precarity of that teacher who quote, unquote, did that to me, but in some ways, it’s the system itself that we need to look at, a scans, and raise our eyebrow at. When we find ourselves telling stories like that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:22]:

I’m always fascinated by conversations with you about language. And since you did reach out on that DM, and and I was like, whatever it is. I’m I’m there for it. The answer is yes. But what it turned out to be about is a a new a book called undoing the grade. Would you share about why undoing the grade and not any number of other titles that may or may have included the word ungrading in it.

Jesse Stommel [00:32:47]:

Yeah. I actually so I went back and forth on the title, and I probably sent 20 different titles to various people in my life. And there was a particular core group of people who I was most interested in. And, you know, I obviously, 2 of the people I was interested in hearing from were the who wrote the forward and the afterward to the book because they were gonna be sitting in this book. And in some ways, I felt like it was appropriate to bring them into the conversation around the title. So that’s Martha Bertis and Sean Michael Morris who wrote, respectively, the forward and the afterward. But I remember all of the various different things that I sent to folks to kind of just see how they felt about them. And then I also ran across myself. And some of the decisions I was making was do I want the word ungrading in the title and ungrading? I in some of my most recent pieces that I’ve written about ungrading, and I’ve been writing about this for years and leading workshop shops on it for years. But what I’ve noticed is that the second that something feels like it congeals into a zeitgeist The second something feels like it becomes, you know, fodder for a headline in the chronicle of higher education or inside higher ed. I immediately kind of find myself shrinking from it and going as much as I’ve used this word and kind of encouraged this word to spread I also find myself raising my eyebrow at it and wondering at how the word is working and what it’s doing. And so I ended up deciding to not have the word in the title of the book, although it’s in the title of chapters and I talk about it and I define it in the book, but I wanted to kind of have this book feel like it was moving forward from that conversation or at least asking myself to wonder out what the next set of questions I wanted to ask was, even if the book is mostly representing all the conversations I’ve had leading up to this moment. That’s the way books work. They take a long time to write. So you’re never really writing a book about the conversation you want to have next. It’s always about the conversation that you just had. But then the other thing I was struggling with is I didn’t want the book title to feel academic. I wanted it to feel accessible. I wanted it also to kind of sort of cut right to the point of what the book was about. So the book is called undoing the grade. And then the subtitle is why we grade and how to Stommel this is probably the most direct subtitle or title I’d ever use in my writing, but I really wanted it to kind of force you to kind of bristle at it a little bit because I want it to kind of be bracing almost. And I don’t necessarily know if the book does that entirely. Instead, it’s a provocation, a sort of what would it be if we really asked the question, what would happen if we didn’t grade? And again, I don’t know that the book can fully answer that in some ways that has to be a conversation we have with each other and probably over the next 10 years. So that that’s what I was thinking about when I was titling it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:43]:

Love that so much. And and I when I think back, to younger me who didn’t question the authority and the processes and policies and and the way that I wish I might have been able to do. Something like this takes away the trappings of the formality of academia that that can be really intimidating. To lots of different kinds of people. And just to have a let’s have the real conversation. The those words are, I could show those to our nine year old and our eleven year old, and they would know what every one of those words mean. They actually would be very well versed to have conversations about it. The older of the 2 just got into middle school, And, just was reading through the syllabi with him as was my husband and we’re going into grades, Jesse. We’re going into grades. They have wonderful teachers. It was interesting. By the way, side note, the the English the English teacher had a mention of AI, which I thought was fascinating an an fascinating choice for a middle school English teacher to say they didn’t say you may use AI. They just said if you use it to sign it, which I also like, Woolf, that’s just kind of interesting. What got into this two page, very graphical syllabus, and what did I mean, it’s just really intriguing. So I don’t want to enter into via our son these things as if we have to be antagonistic toward the broader systems and structures. That doesn’t it isn’t representative of all educators and what they believe it might be a way of fostering learning. And I I know that you I like, how do you ever measure it anyway? But, I mean, I I guess fostering might be the the best the best word that I can come up with to use there.

Jesse Stommel [00:37:21]:

Yeah. And I also I mean, the thing is the other you know, the word undoing, which I ultimately kinda wanted to nod to the on and ungrading And the word undoing is kind of interestingly often my title does something that is not explained in the book at all. Like, my previous book and urgency of teachers an urgency being a mass plural of teachers. The book never says that that’s what the title was trying to do. And in fact, we only came up with that after we wrote the book. But it was sort of a ultimately, when I’m titling something, it’s about what is the kernel here? Like, what does my book make me think of? And to me, the double entendre of the word undoing, both you can undo the grade, but the grade is also our undoing. To me, that’s where that that’s kinda where I left when I finished writing this book. That’s what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the degree to which We both have power over the grade, and that’s ideally what the book is about, but there’s also a power that it has over us that we can’t just simply release ourselves from. There is no just pure ungrading because it is still there hovering in the room affecting how we build relationship to one another. And that’s something I really noticed in the pandemic when we started to see things like compassionate grading policies, even the notion that we would that wouldn’t shouldn’t grading always be compassionate? Why would we need a special compassionate grading policy? And then if we were to do all this work to come up with these compassionate grading policies. Why would we go back to the previous policies? And that’s what I’ve seen in the last couple of years. I’ve actually seen a reversion to some of the most conservative, even if there is a nice movement and conversation around progressive teaching and things like ungrading, I’m simultaneously seeing some of the deepest conservatism in capital s schools and capital h higher education.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:11]:

The power that control the fear Yeah. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. If it’s not obvious to people need to check this book out, there are multiple ways to read it. Have all the links in the show notes, but Jesse and I only had a chance to touch on a small portion of them. So I do really truly recommend it. I mean, I recommend anything and everything that Jesse has written, you’ve taught me so much. I admire you so much. I’m grateful for today’s conversation. Second thing I wanna recommend, I don’t I don’t do this often if I do maybe every 5 years or something, but sometimes I get a lot of times if people interview me about podcasting, They always want me to pick a favorite. I’m like, you can’t pick a favorite podcast episode. So I’ll him and and not answer the question in as concisely as I would like, but I I just don’t like the word best, but truly the the episode I would like to recommend today that that people might like to go back and revisit this episode 3 20 with you, Jesse, how to be together online. And I can’t call it the best because how again, how could I pick a best? But best for me to continue to rattle around inside me. And, yes, I was very interested continue to be very interested in, wanting to resist this idea that we can’t build very healthy, strong, treasured connections online. I just I I I really wish that we could break that fallacy down for a whole bunch of reasons. So I did enjoy that part of our conversation, but what’s really been rattling around the most for me about that conversation is that we talked about words. And and we actually, there has only ever been 2 episodes with curse words on it in the history of the the show almost nine and a half years now. And so one was I was quoting Anne Lamont, who is an author. I’m not gonna say it again because our podcast editor is just gonna shake his hands. And then so in this episode, we did we did curse, but was all around language just, you know, me wanting to for our kids, like, I don’t wanna tell them there’s bad words, good words. So if you’re interested in sort of words and language and I’d really suggest that. And I just treasure those conversations. The last thing I wanna recommend, buckle up, Jesse. Buck, are you ready? Listeners not go up. So, sadly, my colleague, David Rhodes, who is, some people might recognize his name. He’s was on the 2nd most downloaded episode ever of Teaching in Higher Ed. It was around high flex learning, and it came out right when the pandemic you can imagine Google and etcetera, you know, loves those search terms and everything. So, he recently came back on that episode and we had a chance to revisit that and why has high flex become a dirty word and, you know, talk to some of the some of those challenges and issues there. But, anyway, sadly, poor David gets COVID. And David and I spend 5 a half hours indoors together and guess who gets COVID. I coupled with I was scheduled to go out and visit a university and do a kino into workshops. Didn’t get to go. My husband got it. Our daughter has it. Our son is the last man standing. We don’t know as of his recording that he’s actually gonna make at the other side. But anyway, David and I are within 2 weeks of each other’s age. And we love music. And we also just enjoy banter and have a very fun sense of humor together. And so Our colleague Shannon is the only person left on this team. She was also indoors with David for 5 hours We still can’t figure out how she managed to escape this, but so she was at our university having to do all of the largest events that we run for our fact. And this is our this is our show time, this period of 2 weeks. So we have a playlist I wanna recommend, and it’s titled emerging. And I don’t say the word COVID because if you put that in, you know, you’re just gonna get all kinds of mess. But so it’s emerging from CVD. We’ll see if I get it. And, So it’s love songs for our colleague, Shannon, who we love so much and is just so gifted. So if it’s where the love songs are coming from, And it is songs about COVID to us. Like, there’s that, I’m gonna get you, get you, get you, get you one way or another. It spans decades. It spans all different kinds of musical genres. I sent it to my friend from college, my closest, closest friend for decades now, and she texted back and was like, I’m halfway through. It’s 18 hours, by the way, Jess. We all just kept contributing to this playlist, and it is so random. So so, so, so, so, very eclectic and such a fun listen don’t even think I’ve gotten through all 18 hours of the music yet, but super fun. So that’s what I wanna recommend. I do not recommend COVID. I am very grateful that we had a very mild case, both of us, our families too. Everyone’s just fine. Everyone’s fine, fine, fine. And for that, we are grateful and grateful for each other’s sense of humor, and that we’re able to come together as a team. And Jesse, surprise, surprise, contribute in a lot of ways virtually and not get other people sick. So

Jesse Stommel [00:44:09]:

Indeed. I so I wanna recommend every single episode of your podcast. It is sort of the longest running podcast that I feel like I’ve been following since almost the very beginning until now. Can’t remember how many times I’ve been on it, but as I was telling you just before we started recording, when I released this new book, you are the only person that I reached out to directly and said, hey. I just wanna sit down and talk with you, and it’s partly because I love how much our conversations are never really about what we say they’re gonna be about. And yet they circle around that thing in a way that I feel like is really productive. So I I love that. I’ll also recommend If you wanna listen to a playlist I made, it is if you Google the hazel mix tape and Jesse Stommel, you might have to throw Stammel in there. I did make playlist for my daughter when she was tiny, like, one month old. And that playlist is still listed on my blog with little liner notes from me about the various songs. I bet it would also be good. A lot of those songs would probably be good for your your playlist as well to be added to it. So I wanna recommend a few things. 1, to some degree, one of the things I talk about in the book is how it’s important that in order to look forward, we have to look back. We have to recognize that people have been having conversations about grades, and they’ve been have pushing back on grades As long as there have been conversations about grades, there have been conversations pushing back on grades. And so really asking ourselves, like, how long has this conversation been going on? I often look at like the work of Virginia Woolf. She writes about education in a room of one’s own. So there’s some little kind of nods towards the no of ungrading and how do we own our own learning, right, in that book? And also the work of John and Evelyn Dewey. John Dewey and his daughter, Evelyn Dewey. Really fantastic stuff if people wanna kind of reach back and ask where are these conversations about progressive education coming from. And then I’m gonna recommend 2 other genres of things that are essentially representative of what my life looks like. So sure I teach and write about ungrading and to you on the Teaching And Higher Ed podcast. I’m also a dad, and I spend time doing that. And I’m gonna talk about the movie that I most enjoyed watching with Hazel recently, which is the little Mermaid, the live action version of the little Mermaid. I’ve loved the little Mermaid since I was I I think I was maybe 12 or or so 12 or 13 when it came out. I’ve always loved the little mermaid. Fantastic. Fantastic movie. Other thing I’m gonna recommend is in addition to being a dad and being a teacher, I also own a toy and game store in Littleton, Colorado that I run with my husband And just this week, I was dungeon mastering for some middle school kids. We we dungeon master for eleven to fourteen year olds And the module that I took them through is called journey through the Radiant Citadel. And this is produced by wizards of the coast, the makers of Dungeons And Dragons, but it is a collection of 12 different one one shot. They’re called, a single adventure in a collected, in a in a in what feels like a story. And these ones are all written by people of color. So this book won a lot awards, 12 adventures, all written by people of color, and then they intersect in interesting multiversion ways. So those are my recommendations for today.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:25]:

I don’t think I can get anything done the rest of this week. I think I just need to go listen to the playlist and watch I haven’t seen the live act movie yet of Little Mermaid. I remember liking it as a movie, so looking forward to that. And — And

Jesse Stommel [00:47:38]:

you’re gonna play dungeons and dragons.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:40]:

I haven’t played dungeons and dragons I was probably twelve years old, and I’m fifty 2 now. So I got some I got some catching up to do, I would guess. So many people that I admire, like yourself, are really into it. When you were on one of the most recent times you you maybe it was twice ago. The the dice that your husband make the custom done to the I’ve been telling people about that ever since then. I mean, those those are so precious that, you know, such a unique gift for people, that kind of thing. So well, Jesse, I’m so glad to have this conversation. You asked how many times. So as of today, five times, And one of those times you mentioned was the episode with Sean, Michael Morris, and I had forgotten until sometime in the last year. I think I went and looked kind of even remember that conversation. I have to go back and listen to that again. What a treat to get to speak to both of you at the same time. So thank you for today’s conversation, Jesse. And for all of them, that I get to just listen one way on and and the fun times I get to to have the 2 way conversations.

Jesse Stommel [00:48:35]:

Thank you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:38]:

Thanks once again to Jesse Stommel for joining me for today’s episode in Teaching in Higher Ed. Today, episode was produced by me, Bonnie Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. If you’ve been listening for a while and haven’t yet signed up for the weekly date from teaching in Higher Ed Bonni over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent show notes as well as some other resources that show up in the show notes pages. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.