Who can leverage alt-assessment?

Alt-anything, really.

I’m especially interested in the facilitating and constraining power dynamics in people’s lives, so I listen carefully when they describe how and why they enacted their next steps in any given context.

Do go on.

In talking with lots of faculty about how and why they do what they do, I bring words of warning about alt-assessment: Tread carefully.

In a recent study, I note that faculty will want to carefully consider their positionality in the context of pedagogical innovation:

As Yep (2016) explains, “positionality points to the fact that our identities are always relationally shaped within hierarchies of power” (p. 85). Those positionalities are created by intersecting identities (Crenshaw, (1991): The concept of intersectionality speaks to some of the limitations of all actors within the social world with an emphasis on social identity as a central location of intersectional work. The social identity, according to Yep (1998), “gives people a sense of ‘being,’ a lens through which they perceive and experience the social world, and a prescription for ways of ‘acting’” (p. 85).  Positionality can be an enabling and constraining factor, so faculty are wise to determine how they are enabled and constrained by virtue of positionality.

Many faculty in the study reported that they did not seek permission to make changes to grading schemes in their courses in light of the following:

• Positive relationships with proximate leaders

• Tenure or other status at the institution that permitted them to engage in whatever pedagogical practices they felt were appropriate

• Race. More than one participant noted, “Well, I’m white,” which meant that they were less likely to be subjected to inherent biases and additional scrutiny

In their piece on alternative assessment from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pittman and Tobin (2022) describe those dynamics this way:

Think of classroom authority and expertise as a force field that surrounds an instructor and creates a protected space within which the teacher’s expertise and skill is assumed . . . Instructors with privileged (white, male) statuses mostly don’t even know the force field is there. Women and instructors of color, meanwhile, definitely know the force field is there, that it tends to malfunction, and that they aren’t always guaranteed safety and space in which to teach.

The authors go on to describe very different experiences in ungrading: One, a tenured white man, the other, a tenured woman of color. The white man received anxious but respectful requests for more information; the woman of color received aggressive, confrontational communication and a student complaint in the dean of students’ office.

The pedagogical choices we make are anything but neutral and objective; they are fully infused with the power dynamics of an entire culture. Faculty engaging in alt-assessment will want to consider how those dynamics facilitate and constrain them before taking on alt-assessment practices.

Conditions matter, too: Sabbatical, maternity leave, reduced teaching loads, stipends for pedagogical innovations, and the like create the conditions necessary for deploying new practices. Alternative assessment is not plug-and-play: Changes to traditional practice require deep thinking, planning, practice, experimentation, space to fail, and revision, all of which take time and resources.

Thus, as the conversation about alt-assessment continues to ramp up, we’ll also need to ramp up our understanding of intersecting power dynamics that constrain and facilitate, even for people who are in relatively privileged positions.

The weight of those forces is not evenly distributed, not even in spaces people believe are free of such dynamics.

Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.