The Hopes and Challenges of Ungrading in the Neoliberal University

The theory and practice of ungrading are gaining popularity among critical pedagogues in Western universities. More professors are experimenting with ungrading as a means of enhancing student learning, strengthening relationships between students and their teachers and peers, and especially of cultivating more critical, self-determining, and engaged citizens. While the literature on ungrading is exciting and inspiring, it tends to focus on issues and relations internal to the classroom and to overlook or underestimate the impacts and consequences of the larger neoliberal context in which these classrooms exist.

In contrast, this paper explores the tension between the liberatory aims and potential of ungraded classrooms and the realities and exigencies of the contemporary corporate university. Drawing on my own experience with ungrading in a third year Sociology course, I address ways in which institutional and other extralocal relations (such as relations with government agencies) shape or organize the ungraded classroom in ways that constrain, complicate, and/or undermine its transformative goals and potential. I then argue that this understanding needs to be incorporated into the design of ungraded classrooms (and classrooms where other forms of critical pedagogy are practiced) in order to mitigate these relations' negative effects, and I offer some examples of how this may be done. Ideally, our pedagogical strategies should aim also to push back against if not to transform these extralocal relations. I offer and invite some discussion about how this might be achieved.