Open and Accessibile Education
Francis Williams
Summer 2019
The primary idea that has garnered my attention from my interactions with CPLC are two-fold. One strikes at the heart of how we currently do education. Some of my interest stems from the book by Cathy Davidson that has resonated with much of my own thinking over the past few years. Some of which I have attempted to implement in a couple of my classes previously. The other piece has to do with “ungrading”, and the discussion I was part of during one of our CPLC sessions.
Delving into the first, CD struck a chord when she discussed the teaching at a community college as compared to four-year institutions. Creating opportunities for students to contribute by injecting what they already know, while challenging them to expand their capacities. This is something I’ve been doing for a few semesters now and what I noticed immediately was the difficulty many students have with being challenged, well at least CJ students. Many of them pushed back, by complaining on student evals that I was putting to much on them. It appears they wanted to be “taught” rather than participate in the learning process. Certainly not all of them but more than I had expected, and it really concerned me. In later semesters I made some adjustments, trying to parse out the pieces that students felt were effective while either changing or eliminating others. I’ve seen some improvement in the number of students who pushed back but have always felt some of it was deeper than the challenge itself. I fear many of our students have never been pushed before. It seems especially acute if they are asked to present their work to their peers. I find this rather interesting and wonder how much the effect of social media has on this seeming inability to accept challenges, especially those that require face-to-face communication with others
This leads to my second point, my interest in ungrading and how it might be used in concert with some of the challenges I present to students. There was a very engaged conversation during our session that focused on how we as teachers give feedback. It is not unusual for me to give a lot of feedback on various assignments especially early in the semester. Frankly, sometimes it is very frustrating as I take a lot of time to provide what I think is constructive feedback that is associated in many cases with scaffolding of assignments – the process of one assignment building on the next, yet too many times it appears as if students never read this feedback as the same errors and issues crop up on future assignments. So, I sometimes wonder why I should bother. I thought some of the ideas generated during the discussion on how feedback might be better served with focusing on process rather than content; thinking about how feedback might affect whether a student reads or pays attention to that feedback; having students write back to me regarding their feedback; and/or using self-assessments. Certainly, so