 Good morning. Thank you for joining me today as I talk about open pedagogy and ungrading overlapping pedagogies of care. My name is Heather Macelli, and I'm coming to you from Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, which are the traditional homelands of the Poconoca and Narragansett. I'm so excited to be here today to talk about two of my favorite aspects of my pedagogy, both open pedagogy and ungrading. I want to start today with this quote from Kate Denial. By prioritizing care and community in our teaching and instructional design, we give ourselves and our students the opportunity to remake this uncertain world. remake this uncertain world and we've been living in an uncertain world since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's been two and a half years, and I think a lot of us have learned a lot from our teaching during this time and one of the most important aspects to me. That plays a huge role in my teaching now is the aspect of care, and I want to share how both open pedagogy and ungrading overlap to increase the amount of care that I show to my students every day. Similar to math anxiety, students are afraid of general education science courses, especially if their courses in high school were taught using the banking model of education described by Freiree. Content, content, content, and then an exam. They fear that their GPAs will suffer when they come into my classroom and they fear that the class will be hard, boring, and most importantly, I think there's quite a bit of fear that it's not really relevant to their education and they're paying for a class that they don't really need. My students come into these general education classes, and the first thing that I have them do is to write a pre-course reflection, and I write similar notes every semester to my students. Your story is common. Lots of students love science up until high school when it was about curiosity and learning things you wanted to learn. So I hope that my classroom can be a space for your curiosity to bloom again. And so one of the hard parts of our profession is defining terms, and open pedagogy is one of those terms that every time somebody asks questions about open pedagogy, the defining question comes up, what is open pedagogy? And I don't think we have a solid answer for it yet. Some of the more simplistic definitions of open pedagogy refer to engaging students in the development, adaptation, and use of open educational resources, and that's true. But I think the critical part of definitions that's sometimes missing is that they truly need to recognize the contribution of students to the knowledge commons that occurs when they use open pedagogy. Recognizing who they are and what they bring to the table beyond presenting content is important. And so I'm going to quickly introduce my core 101 open pedagogy project. I have several presentations that go into this in much more detail than I plan on going into today, and I'll link some of them in the slide presentation, but just to give you a quick overview. The core 101 open pedagogy project is a project that's been running for about four years now. There are 12 published websites and these serve as the textbook for the course. They're all focused on society, societally relevant topics in science such as climate change and vaccines. During each semester students review the website as it currently exists as these are truly renewable assignments, and they identify areas where content needs to be added or updated or areas that need major revision. Each website is in a different level of development. For example, our space exploration page has had 42 student authors over eight semesters. It's been put into semi retired site status because the content is pretty much what you would expect to see in an introductory space website, whereas the ecology and biodiversity website was only just created last semester. So there's still a lot of room for improvement. Still a lot of room for updating, but in these slides, there's a lot of room for me to allow my students the choice and to use their voice in creating the content for future students of this course. And so one of the biggest ways that these websites are updated and relevant to my students is that there are events that happen every semester that are relevant to our topics and to our students. For example here, the semester this page was updated. We read an article about the first ever CRISPR gene surgery that could help cure genetic blindness. And so the DNA page updated it with that information. The students thought it was really interesting. And so they added it. Other examples include climate related events such as the Texas winter storm last in February of 2021. It prompted an addition about how the polar vortex is is impacted by climate change as well as various wildlife wildfire events. I could imagine I'm currently recording this as Hurricane Ian crosses Florida, and the devastation is starting to be revealed to us to the public. And I could imagine that that very well could be in addition to our climate change page as well. Another great example that was especially relevant to our students was how the vaccine page was updated several times in the past two years to discuss COVID-19 vaccines and the new mRNA technology that's used to develop those vaccines. But my favorite benefit to these projects is the ability to focus on aspects of science and the intersect aspects of science that intersect with my students interests and other disciplines. So a few semesters ago I had a student that was a Latin American studies minor. They learned about climate change related migration in one of their other classes, and they wanted to explore a little more of the science side of the issue in our class, but also included the sociological implications on our website that they brought from what they had learned from their courses. Another group of students decided to focus on some of the privacy issues using AI technology and education. This was after pivoting to online and remote courses because of COVID. That was really important that they felt their voices were heard about how violating some of the proctoring software or testing software was during that time. Another great example is again from the vaccine page. My students were very interested in kind of some of the distrust in vaccines and where that had come from. And so they focused on the disparities in vaccination rates and different ethnic groups, both because of health coverage, but also because of distrust in the medical establishment. On this particular page they outlined the Tuskegee Syphilis study and how the exploitation of African Americans by the medical establishment had shaped their views of new and experimental treatments, such as the COVID-19 vaccines. And so here I have a quote from Mary Helen in Mordino, the A, that I think is really pointing in. If they feel no connection to the knowledge they learn in school, the academic content will seem emotionally meaningless to them. Even if they manage to regurgitate the factual information, it will lay barren and without any influence on their decisions and behavior. Learning requires more than mere memorization and we know that open pedagogy gives students the opportunity to become emotionally connected, especially if their choice and voice are leveraged when working in open pedagogy. You may have seen this matrix before, but I love it. I think it's really powerful because I think open pedagogy and other open educational practices move us to thinking just beyond just redistributive justice and making sure that our students can access content to thinking about recognitive and representational justice. So making sure our students are exposed to diverse perspectives and at the same time allowing their voices to be heard. And in doing so, we show that we care for our students by valuing their voice and their choice when we do open pedagogy. And as you can see, adopting an open textbook isn't necessarily transformational on its own. We want to see some more pedagogical equity by using open teaching practices. And so that top right corner is kind of what we shoot for in this space. But what about grading? What about assessment? And this is a common question that I get when I present about open pedagogy is how do you assess open pedagogy projects? Because at the end of the day, there are very different type of project than a lot of people are used to using. And if you allow student voice and choice, you're going to get a variety of products that are going to be completely different. And it's hard to compare one project to the next. And so something else that has come out of the pandemic is a growing movement of scholars that are questioning traditional assessment methods as fervently as open pedagogy enthusiasts are challenging traditional teaching practices. I think this movement has been called the ungrading movement, but many types of grading fall under this umbrella of alternative assessments, many of which you may have heard of or be familiar with. And these include standards based grading, labor based grading, specs grading, skill based grading, collaborative grading, student determined grading, and even pass fail grading. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about all of these different types of grading and I can certainly link some resources in the slide to kind of define what some of those are. I'm going to talk about my personal experiences using one of them. But before I talk about that, I want to talk about why there is this shift from traditional assessment to these alternative assessment strategies. And really a lot of it comes from that grades are not really all that they seem. These bullet points are from Jesse Stommel. Grades are not a good incentive. They're external motivating factors. And the research has shown that students usually do better when they're internally motivated. There's a good feedback. Research has shown that students are less likely to look at feedback if there's a grade on the top of a paper or an exam. The grade tells them what they think they need to know when in fact, there's usually a lot of feedback to go with it. Grades encourage competitive competitiveness over collaboration. So they rank students. We consistently refer to students as an A student, a B student, a C student. GPAs are used in admissions to schools, to med schools, to grad schools, to college, which suggests that there's a limited number of seats available for students at an institution or in a classroom. And I can absolutely, I can imagine that most of you have had group projects, and there's always a worry about what the group grade would be if somebody in the group doesn't participate. Grades are not good markers of learning. Grades usually incorporate measures of behavior. So if you're docking points for late assignments or being late to class or not coming to class, the grade doesn't show what the student learned. It showed how their behavior was in that course. Grades don't reflect the idiosyncratic subjective emotional character of learning. It is a number. It doesn't tell you anything about someone. It also doesn't really tell you, you know, if a student gets a 75 in a course, did they understand, did they understand 75% of the outcomes? Or did they understand each outcome about 75%? I don't know. That grade doesn't tell me anything. And at the end of the day, grades are not fair. A lot of people truly believe that grades are an objective measure of learning. And at the end of the day, grades are a very subjective measure. And so if all of these things about grades are true, aren't they in direct conflict with the principles of head go do that we sell value, especially allowing students choice and voice when completing projects. And so, in my classroom, I use one of the alternative assessments called collaborative reading. And collaborative grading is when a student proposes a grade for themselves, and in it usually a one on one meeting with a faculty member or an instructor of a course, they discuss and present evidence of their learning. And there's a conversation about what grade is earned in the course. When I do collaborative grading, I give a lot of feedback. You have to give feedback. There's no grade. So students need to be able to need to be able to have some kind of actionable feedback that they can use to make their work better. Or for them to understand what they may have done wrong so that they can do it better the next time. For example, one of the key assessment points in my course are topic reflections after each topic that we cover in class. They write two pages about the topic and basically just show what they've learned and what they took away. And for me, responding to these is really fun because I get to see what they love and really took away from the class. But in this space, I also say, Oh, well, I would have liked to have seen you pull out an outside source to help support this topic. Or your reflection is a little short. Here's some ideas for how you can expand it for the next one. So feedback is absolutely critical. There's no points no grades. I do not put any points on anything. And I do three points of self assessment. So at weeks five, 10 and 15, the students self evaluate themselves, they talk about their successes, their challenges, their behaviors, and they propose a grade. And then at the end of the course, we have one on one meetings to discuss that final grade. And there are some misconceptions about ungrading. I'm sure you all have questions. Yes, my students do still do the work even though I don't put a grade on it. It's still an assignment. If they don't do it, they're not participating in the course. And at the end of the course when I asked them what did you learn from this course. If they haven't done the work, they can't answer that question. I am still grading work. It just doesn't involve points. There's a lot of feedback. I'm, I'm, my workload has not changed all that much. I still have to read and respond to student work. So students do not just give themselves an A. I've actually had students that have given themselves the range from A to F. Some students do over or under evaluate themselves, you know, giving themselves an A when they haven't done the work, or giving themselves like an A minus if they've done everything and done it very well. Excuse me. But that's why I have three self assessments so that at the first or the second self assessment. I can kind of catch some of the patterns that I'm used to seeing in students like say a student has come to every class has done all of the reflections been really thoughtful and those reflections have learned something from the courses or from the topics that we've covered in the first five weeks of the course and then they give themselves a B. That gives me an opportunity to step in and say, I don't, I think you're being a little too critical of yourself. On the other hand, if someone decides to give themselves an A at that five week and they missed half of the classes and haven't turned anything in. I can say I think you need to be a little bit more thoughtful about yourself evaluation. To me, I'm grading my collaborative grading fits with open pedagogy. For me, it is another form of care. And these bullet points come from my good friend Katie Matini. She, she believes that building relationships with your students is one of the most important parts of being a caring instructor, and both open pedagogy and both on grading require us to build those relationships. With our students to build trust between us and our students. And, you know, this list here that she puts we don't injure those that we value grades can be harmful they have harmful effects on students it causes a lot of stress and anxiety. We see control to those we value we give them choice we give them power. We view those that we value is more than a number. I once had a question very early on when I was teaching with open pedagogy, and someone asked me would you put a D paper, would you publish a D paper, and it kind of took me back because I was like what's a D paper I don't know what a D paper is. Because it's more than a number it's more than a letter. I don't usually have these because I give my students feedback and they work on them over the course of the semester. It's not a one and done assignment. I'm collaborating with them I want them to put their best foot forward. And help them achieve their goals. They want to take my class they want to pass my class, I will do everything I can to support them in that. And we foster the passions of those we value open pedagogy has so many opportunities for students to think outside of the box. And thinking outside of the box in a traditionally assessed class can be a danger zone. So I'm grading to me is a way that I show that my students I want you to take these chances. And so I'm proposing. In addition to that matrix, another access that if all we are textbooks are on one axis and open teaching practices are on another, an alternative assessments form that third axis and where we want to be is as far away from the origin point, as possible. The origin point is our traditional teaching practices. And so I'm going to leave you today with this quote from now nodding. The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter. Thank you very much. Contact me with any questions. My email is there as is my Twitter handle.