Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 52, Issue 1, 2024

In this special issue introduction about alternative grading practices, we argue that stories from two-year colleges and other underrepresented institutions matter. As our title suggests, this special issue is an attempt to recognize the unrecognized and disrupt the dominant alternative assessment narrative. To meet the needs of all students, especially those whose journeys include two-year colleges, the field must find ways to elevate faculty voices from community colleges, technical colleges, and vocational colleges in conversations about pedagogical innovations, including grading.

The flexibility of labor-based contract grading allowed students in the study to make strategic, intentional, autonomous choices about the types of labor and products they produced. This strategic decision-making helped them to balance the workload requirements of their other classes, employment, and personal issues and laid important groundwork for students’ emerging autonomy.

When we offer students engagement in the creation of the course, not only do we acknowledge that those in culturally minoritized positions are adept at deploying the same skills we seek to teach, but also we show that their lived experiences are valuable, necessary, and desirable within the classroom. This recognition opens a space in which students not only feel a sense of belonging but also create the terms of belonging. This article shares an evolving five-year and running process and offers an overview of how a community-based assessment practice grew from adapting (with students) labor-based grading coupled with self-directed writing.

This article explores the connections between creating an equitable classroom and antiracist assessment. The article attempts to explain the impact of the equitable classroom on student apathy. Additionally, rigid concepts of “failing” under this equitable classroom model are interrogated. Finally, the article provides some insights into the limitations and pitfalls of the equitable classroom design.

This Instructional Note is for two-year college instructors who have attended conference presentations and read articles about the benefits of ungrading and want to know more about the pragmatics of teaching and how the shift to alternative assessment will affect their work.

Introducing an alternative grading framework to students can be a challenge. Instructors might encounter student resistance, confusion, and frustration. To better help students understand both why moving away from traditional grading practices is important and how the classroom’s alternative assessment system functions, this Instructional Note suggests centering dialogue, students’ histories with grades, and an overview of the classroom’s alternative grading practice during the first couple of weeks of class.

This essay explores the pedagogical potential of using labor-based grading and gameful learning design in a first-year writing course at an open-access college in the Southeastern United States.

This symposium documents an ongoing conversation between five faculty members from Portland Community College. The discussion explores what “equity-based assessment” means, grappling both with the reasons for adopting such approaches as contract grading, labor-based grading, and ungrading and with the challenges of implementing them in two-year colleges.