At CCCC 2022, I participated in a department panel presentation on how we implemented labor-based assessment and scaled it across our core writing program.
Access copy of my part of the talk below.
Dismantling Architectures of Power: On Collaboration and Implementation in Labor and Assessment Schemas
Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Online
March 11, 2022
Equitable Labor Statement
Hello everyone! I’m Vyshali Manivannan, and I’d like to talk a little about the philosophy behind our “Equitable Labor Statement for Faculty.” In it, we recognize that academic labor is inextricable from our embodied identities, particularly for those of us who are multiply marginalized. While labor-based grading practices foster agency for faculty and students throughout the entire teaching and learning process, they can initially create more work for faculty. In the process of scaling and implementing this department-wide initiative, it became apparent that, for the sake of equity, we needed to consider the material, lived realities of our faculty, particularly women, BIPOC, disabled folks, and caregivers, who most often face extra labor demands.
Academic labor tends to be devalued both outside and inside the university. Gill (2014) observes that, socially, we are subject to the toxic myth that low contact hours, flexible schedules, and allegedly high salaries mean that we possess an incredible amount of leisure time and should consider ourselves lucky. Meanwhile, inside the university, the culture of overwork is pervasive among all academic ranks and salaries. A great deal of scholarship, including by Gonzalez and Ayers (2018), Kahn (2017), Wright (2017), and Babb and Wooten (2017), has outlined the precarity of graduate students, adjuncts, and contingent faculty, who generally teach full loads and have no job security, no fringe benefits, and little to no chance of shared governance, but are nevertheless expected to participate in department life via frequently unpaid trainings; contributions to papers, proposals, and curriculum design; and informal student mentoring. Employment renewal and/or promotion depend on enacting the discourse of “excellence,” as Wright (2017) calls it, an ideologically empty term concerned primarily with market logics and competition.
In fact, so much labor is expected of us, with so little guidance as to how much time faculty should invest, that there is little to no time for working toward meaningful professionalization or promotion. As Gill (2014) puts it, since time must be made, we must sacrifice our personal time. This has of course worsened in the last two years given changes to work-life balance and additional caregiving responsibilities necessitated by the pandemic. All this, coupled with the precarity of contingent faculty, has created what Gill (2014) calls “a mobile, agile, flexible workforce par excellence,” willing to relocate or commute long distances for work and developing rapid-fire responsiveness to new calls for papers, funding streams, departmental and university assessments, and student demands. This in turn means that without clear and explicit labor expectations, the assumption that academics don’t clock in and clock out is perpetuated. This expectation is reinforced with rhetoric suggesting that faculty who do otherwise aren’t committed to the life of the university or to student success, without acknowledging that self-care is necessary to sustain that work.
We tried to explicitly divest from the culture of overwork in our “Equitable Labor Statement for Faculty” by accounting for how race, class, gender, sexuality, and able-bodymindedness inform how we allocate our time, energy, and labor in designing and teaching writing courses. We developed our labor-based grading contracts to accommodate and support our students, but, as this statement indicates, our system is also considerate of the material, lived realities of faculty who are women, BIPOC, disabled folks, caregivers, or who embody other contexts that increase precarity or demand time and energy. Our hope was that this statement would serve as a preface to our labor-based grading initiative, openly acknowledging that the acceleration and commercialization of academia creates an increasingly precarious and anxious professoriate, for whom care work for students is written into the overall commitment to faculty “excellence” while care for the self is formulated as an easy, essential sacrifice. A clear delineation of expected labor and temporal and affective investment is an important move toward collective care work and access in writing programs, which are often staffed by a large pool of contingent faculty.
From Previous Research to Gaps in the Scholarship
Traditional grades cater to extrinsic (not intrinsic) motivation, amplifying fears of failure and minimizing enjoyment of learning. Grades based on quality can be highly subjective. Within such a system, students become less likely to take risks and more likely to attempt to produce “what the professor wants.” Several scholars, like Elbow (2008), Shor (1996, 2009), Inman and Powell (2018), Moreno-Lopez (2005), and Inoue (2019), have discussed the effectiveness of grading contracts in disrupting traditional assessment practices to establish a “culture of support” between all members of a given course or academic community.
Kohn (1999, 2006), Davidson (2015), Wilson (2006), and others have suggested that student-centered learning demands an alternative credentialing mechanism. They have delineated multiple forms of “ungrading,” from portfolio systems to student-made rubrics and peer assessments to labor-based or contract grading, which consider labor quantifiable in a way that quality is not. Inoue (2019) points out that assessment ecologies are political economies in which grades are a commodity, and if labor is at the center of theories of value, recentering labor in classroom assessments is a sensible move. He suggests that “labor-based grading contracts offer conditions that help students learn and develop along explicitly stated course goals better than conventional grading ecologies,” and that they are “ethical on the grounds of fairness in what is graded, or what counts toward grades, and so what counts as course goals.”
Research has shown that grading contracts have evolved beyond shared classroom governance to include practices that destabilize uniform writing protocols and the unilateral nature of “traditional” grading standards, actions that neglect to recognize student diversity. Labor-based grading also eliminates time and energy expended on making sure grades and ranking of student papers are justified. Additionally, labor-based grading contracts lessen the likelihood of grade contestations, thus freeing faculty—especially women or BIPOC professors—from the emotional labor associated with anxious, combative, or academically entitled students.
However, as Carillo (2021) observes, there are hidden inequities in many labor-based grading systems; the labor-based grading contract tends to center a normative body, if a non-White one, even though equitable assessment practices must attend to students’ multiple identities. She notes time as another consideration; our bodies and personal responsibilities differently dictate our limits; and consequently, we experience, understand, and use time differently. A swift task for one might be painstaking work for another; where some have uninterrupted workdays and are able to meet even last-minute deadlines, some require flexible schedules due to familial obligations, personal health, external teaching assignments, graduate school, or other factors. The work of preparing for courses, giving feedback, and assigning grades is arduous and time-intensive. Furthermore, she warns that without careful design and implementation, labor-based contracts might fail to reward extra labor or might revert to being instruments that measure quality. Craig (2020) has also hinted at the difficulties of actually implementing labor-based grading in the classroom for untenured marginalized faculty, as it asks them to convince students that contract grading is superior to the traditional forms of assessment that brought them to us in the first place. Thus, poorly implemented forms of ungrading could reproduce or reify existing structures of oppression.
While previous scholarship regarding labor-based grading has done well to address the pedagogical worth of labor-based grading contracts, an implementation gap remains, explicitly with regard to departmental scaling that remains cognizant and considerate of instructor identity. Our grading contract, therefore, is an amalgamation of voices, challenging colleagues to find a common language through the din of sociocultural and socioeconomic tensions, critical discourse that served to unify our final document, grading practices, and departmental identity. This ideology is extended to a grading matrix, a system for equitably earning course grades that align with the contract.
In designing and implementing an antiracist composition program, we evenly distributed and compensated faculty labor, funding our initiative in novel ways, and drafted programmatic materials that both express our commitment to antiracist frameworks and offer explicit instructions to guide faculty in how to present and use labor-based grading in the classroom. By making our commitment to antiracist frameworks explicit, we implicitly cast our labor-based grading system as a set of guidelines to be experimented with and improved on, at low risk to even precarious faculty. The materials we developed and are sharing here encapsulate our attempt to address the “implementation gap” between labor-based grading’s day-to-day functionality and its ability to be scaled from a one-off classroom policy to one integrated across an entire department in ways that, we hope, begin to dismantle architectures of power by enacting a paradigm shift away from the inequitable academic culture of overwork.
Works Cited
Babb, J. & Wooten, C. (2017). Traveling on the assessment loop: The role of contingent labor in curriculum development. In Kahn, S., Lalicker, W. B., & Lynch-Biniek, A. Contingency, exploitation, and solidarity: Labor and action in English composition (pp. 169-182). WAC Clearinghouse.
Craig, S. (2021). Your contract grading ain’t it. WPA: Writing Program Administration, 44(3), 145-146.
Davidson, C. (2015, August 16). Getting started 6: Contract grading and peer review. HASTAC.
Danielewicz, J., & Elbow, P. (2008). A unilateral grading contract to improve learning and teaching. College
Composition and Communication, 61(2), 244-268.
Gill, R. (2014). Unspeakable inequalities: Postfeminism, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the repudiation of sexism among cultural workers. Social Politics, 21(4), 509-528.
Gonzales, L. D. & Ayers, D. (2018). The convergence of institutional logics and the normalization of emotional labor: A new theoretical approach for considering the expectations and experiences of community college faculty. The Review of Higher Education.
Inman, J. and Powell, R. (2018). In the absence of grades. College Composition and Communication, 70(1), 30-56.
Inoue, A. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom. WAC Clearinghouse.
Kahn, S. (2017). The problem of speaking for adjuncts. In Kahn, S., Lalicker, W. B., & Lynch-Biniek, A. Contingency, exploitation, and solidarity: Labor and action in English composition (pp. 259-270). WAC Clearinghouse.
Kohn (1999). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes. Houghton Mifflin.
Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Educational Leadership, 69(3), 28-33.
Moreno-Lopez, I. (2005). Sharing power with students: The critical language classroom. Radical Pedagogy.
Wright, A. (2017). The rhetoric of excellence and the erasure of graduate labor. In Kahn, S., Lalicker, W. B., & Lynch-Biniek, A. Contingency, exploitation, and solidarity: Labor and action in English composition (pp. 271-278). WAC Clearinghouse.
Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. University of Chicago Press.
Shor, I. (2009). What is critical literacy? In Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P., & Torres, R. D. (Eds.), The Critical Pedagogy Reader (pp. 282-297), Routledge.
Wilson, M. (2009). Responsive writing assessment. Educational Leadership, 67(3), 58-62.
