Listening to the Stories My Students Are Telling: Charles's Perspective

• In Event: Stories of Humanizing Assessment: Disrupting, Dismantling, and Reimagining Assessment in Teacher Education and Beyond

Abstract

As a middle-class, cisgender, straight, abled male, I attempt to take up less space in the classroom than my students. The unlearning that I am undertaking impacts the way I engage with marginalized and minoritized people in my life and influences how I use my unearned privileges to support my students and colleagues. My scholarship and educational stance have also been shaped by these lessons. This position favors stories people tell rather than considering them as numbers or points on a graph. This has been my motivation behind moving toward an ungraded classroom. One of the stories my students tell is through the artifacts they construct over the course of a semester – and beyond. This is their story of what they learned and how they are developing as teachers.
As a faculty member in a predominantly white College of Education in middle Tennessee, I teach teacher education courses on the foundations of education, supporting diverse students, and human development all while being an uninvited guest on the ancestral land of the Tsalaguwetiyi (ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ) People, who were part of the Cherokee Nation. I acknowledge, through the course work of these classes, the legacies of the violent dislocation and the death of culture that the Tsalaguwetiyi experienced. My students and I work together towards taking steps to un-do the weaponization of education and schooling.
The idea of going gradeless in the College and department in which I work was unheard of before I started moving in that direction. The first time I attempted it in one of my graduate classes, the chair of my department worried that if a student was to dispute the final grade they received in my class, I would not have any evidence or support to defend myself. This was not something I considered. I envisioned the freedom my students would have; I thought about how much lighter everyone would feel (myself included); I anticipated the connections we would make and how the “big picture” of the course would be more visible and the excitement experienced when grades weren’t the focus. But I never considered a student disputing a grade. And so far, I haven’t needed to worry about that – although all the feedback my students receive from their classmates and me would be more than enough of a demonstration of why a student earned their final grade.
Currently I have only gone gradeless in my graduate courses, but my next steps are to do it with my undergrads. My hesitancy is because many of my undergraduate students are not far removed from their time in high school. American education has created a society of folks very reliant on quantitative measures as a way to determine how well they are doing in school, rather than qualitative measures, such as evaluation notes, conversations with me, and formal feedback they have received. I will hold space to discover how others have supported students in breaking out of this mindset.

Author

• Charles H. Gonzalez, Austin Peay State University
  Presenting Author