The Grading Podcast

99 – Asao Inoue

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Dr. Asao Inoue: I also negotiate with students or build a, a charter for compassion. So these are practices that we will do together. We also read a little bit about compassion in different disciplines, from philosophy to history, to political science to English and and literature. We look at different articulations and expressions of compassion and what it means and then we build a, a list as long as we wanna make it, of compassion practices we promise to try to do in order to create a culture of compassion in the class.

That’s from responding to each other’s work, to reading work together to engaging in conversations with me or with each other, or doing the work of the class in a, a sustainable and ethical way. So those things, and that has been a really important part of my class and those negotiations with the graded contract. And then, it becomes the threads. A good portion of my students say that’s the thing that they take away is the compassion.

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’ learning from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our student success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State la.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: Well, you’re gonna keep asking that question and I’m gonna keep making you jealous because my semester’s over, it’s the day before my birthday, so I am in a really good mood. I got a lot of work done and just feeling like I’m recovering quite a bit. How about you?

Boz: Yeah, I’ve got a few more weeks before I get to that point. The closer we get to both the conference and this really large PD series that I’m having to help plan for the office I work at now is very, very taxing. So yeah, I’ve got a few more weeks before I feel that relaxation that you’ve got now and yes, I am jealous.

Sharona: Well, and then speaking of the conference, last week’s episode with the organizers was so much fun. And that was episode 98. This one today we’re gonna be doing is 99. So we have something really special that I’m not going to talk about for episode 100, which is coming out, I believe, the day before the conference, so.

Boz: That’s right.

Sharona: Really excited that, you know, I guess most podcasts don’t make it past a few episodes, so the fact that we made it to episode 100 is pretty cool. So that’s also very exciting.

Boz: And with this one being episode 99, we also have a very special guest. Who do we have with us today? Sharona.

Sharona: So we have Dr. Asao Inoue. Did I say that correctly?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Close enough. Inoue.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Thanks so much. I appreciate it. By the way, it’s you said that you’re about to celebrate your birthday. My birthday is June 5th, so you might be a Gemini?

Sharona: I am definitely a Gemini, yeah.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Okay. So we share that.

Sharona: Geminis Unite. Absolutely.

Dr. Asao Inoue: I’m also an actual twin, so, oh.

Sharona: Well, okay. I am not, my sister and I look quite a bit alike, or we did when we were younger, but we are not twins. That’s exciting. Well, happy birthday to you as well.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yes. Happy birthday to you. Yeah.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Well, thank you. Well, I’m excited and honored to be able to offer it. So, yeah.

Boz: So one of the things that we always like to ask our new guest is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah. So as you mentioned, my field is rhetoric and composition, the teaching of writing. And so I’m thinking primarily in terms of writing classrooms so know that as the context. I thought I’d answer this question, i’ll answer it a little differently than just giving you the origin. Early on in my teaching there were some misconceptions I would say that I had about grading in the classroom, in the writing classroom, that I didn’t fully understand, and I didn’t understand why I didn’t understand those things. Later I would find out it’s because people in my field tend not to be trained in understanding these problems because they don’t seem like problems.

And so once I understood that, then I could understand better what to do and what possibilities there were. The misconceptions were numerous, but they started with understanding, say for instance, what exactly is grading when we do that act on language performances in a writing classroom. And what is the role that a rubric or a scoring guide or whatever we’re using to offer students to say here’s my expectations and here’s what we’ll produce or tell you what your grade is or should be, or whatever. The what that actually is, I thought, like everyone else that I knew that when we talked about it in in grad school, I thought it was, those are a set of expectations that are fairly objective. And the fair thing to do in a classroom is to give them those expectations and then use only those expectations to produce a grade or points or whatever you’re using, whatever system you’re using to evaluate. And I found out that all of those things are slippery. The expectations, they’re all, I would call ’em say problematic, in the sense that Freire talks about the problematic being partly social, and that is structural, and partly internal to the person who’s looking at it. So now I understand a grade, while I could give it on say a paper or something, a performance, it’s actually much more about my reading of the language than about something inherent in the language itself.

And if that’s the case, then that grade is really difficult to determine, especially when my students are very, very different than me. They don’t come from the same places that I do. And I have a very different embodied subject position in the world, and I language in ways that are different than them, and they do from me. And so it’s very hard for me to, and again, these are things I didn’t understand initially. I thought it was simply, you learn standardized English, I’m gonna teach it to you. Here’s the rubric, and you follow that. If I’ve given it to you, I’ve been fair, and if I use it, I’m being fair. But it’s fairness is not as simple as that. So that’s where it really started, was understanding that. And then later it, the added layer was understanding how judgment, what judgment really is. I. That is the judgment of language. And I find that to be an infinitely fascinating set of ideas and prospects for the, particularly the language classroom, but it’s really any classroom. ‘Cause we have to make judgments all the time. And when we talk to each other and when we language with each other, we are making all kinds of judgments. Even when we don’t think of them as judgments, they’re still judgments. Like what word to use, what does that word mean? What does this word mean in this context? How do I say this to this person? And what do they, what do I think that they think I mean and so forth. And so all those things to me are really, really fascinating. And they are all intimately tied up in both the structures that make us and us. That is what we think of as us as an individual being with agency and our own ideas which I think is also complicated. I’m not sure how we can have our own ideas.

Sharona: So it’s fascinating to me because we do a lot of interdisciplinary work, Bosley, and I do. So we actually as mathematical educators, we’ve worked with English faculty, we’ve worked with history faculty, and a common thing we’re always told is that this grading stuff, that you’re talking about, will work in every other field except my own. So we see how it works in math, but not English. We see how it works in English, but not math. We see how it works. And I think part of it is what you’re saying, what’s resonating with me right now is many mathematicians will say, well, we don’t have the problem that you have. Mm-hmm. Because we have right answers. So, so, I mean, tell me I’m wrong, Boz I mean, isn’t that one of the issues?

Boz: No, absolutely. But I, I, I, and I know where you’re going with this, Sharona, but I wanna take a quick step back. Okay. ’cause there’s another, I think, really big point in some of what you were saying, and I kind of wanna explore it a little bit. So you said you had this misconception.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Mm-hmm.

Boz: And at first you didn’t know they were misconceptions. Where did those misconceptions come from? Like, if these ideas were there?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Do you mean how did I recognize them as a misconception or?

Boz: No, no. Where did you, where did you get them to begin with?

Sharona: Where’d you learn them?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah. I learned them from the teachers and professors that I took my classes from. And I decided early on, even before I decided to do any kind of what we now might call un grading or alternative grading, even before that. I decided I was not going to simply reproduce the practices that was performed upon me. I needed to have an informed reason for why I was doing the kind of grading and judgment or a response practices in my classrooms.

So, I early on be, even before I went back to grad school, so this was after my master’s, even before I went back to graduate school to get my PhD, I started doing research on grading and assessments to do what I thought was, I wanna do response to student writing. Not grade them. Even though I still had to grade them. I wanted to think of it as response, which is what much of the field was doing at that time, I think, like in the eighties and the early nineties. But that’s that wasn’t enough for me. I realized that still wasn’t, ’cause it didn’t answer the crucial questions about assessment in the language classroom that, that I started to have. And the ultimate fruition of thinking about the misconceptions was understanding that assessment, and that’s a larger umbrella. So we’ll say grading. That grading is an ecology. It’s more than simply a judgment. It’s more than simply a rubric. It’s more than simply a set of values or expectations. It is a lot of, it is all those things and so much more, it’s a set of power dynamics and, and relationships in a classroom. It is the people that are in that classroom. It is the outcomes that are expected and then that we get.

So I’m not talking about the institutional outcomes that we might talk about in terms of assessments, but I’m talking about the learning things, the products that we, that, that students actually embody when they step out of the classroom after an activity or after an essay or after whatever they’ve been learn, doing the learning. And it’s all the processes and laboring that happens in and around that class by the students. So it’s a lot of stuff.

Boz: Yeah. And, and that’s why I wanted to bring that up because that’s been two of the things that Sharona and I have been harping on for a very long time. And the first one is grading is one of the biggest task, whether we like it or not. Grading is one of the biggest tasks an educator has, and we have found almost no one that has any training on it in their education or their undergrad program. Like their, we’ve seen a handful of people that, you know, had a grading class or we’ve heard a few that are starting to try to do like a grading 101, but it is so very rare that most of the time, how do we start grading? By doing what was done to us.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah.

Boz: And, and like you said you examined that and you found these things, but most people aren’t taking that kind of inward and in depth examination of that. It’s part of the reason things with grading are so hard to change because at some level, all of us that are educators, were successful at the scheme and the game that, you know is, is traditional grading.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah.

Boz: So I found, I found that interesting. I, I’m curious. You, you said you started this before you went back to get your doctorate, like, did you go straight from one to the other? Did you teach a couple of years? Like what kind of time span are we talking about?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah, that between the getting my MA and going back to get my PhD, it was about five years. In that five year period, I taught, I was a faculty member at a community college for the last portion. But before that, I decided I wasn’t gonna be an adjunct, I wasn’t gonna participate in the exploitation of my labor. So instead, what I did was I went and became a tech writer. And so for a couple of years I was a tech writer for Hewlett Packard and Mitsubishi Silicon and NASA. And god gave me some really wonderful experience in the world, but also it made me realize I could not do that, that I, that’s not the work for me. I was, I felt every day in a cubicle, my soul was being leached away, just like. Even though it was interesting, initially, I was like, Ugh, I can’t, I just can’t do it, do it anymore.

So I went back and I joined a community college and it was a really wonderful experience. I loved that community college. It was in Salem, Oregon. Chemeketa community college. It was a wonderful place. But yeah, so that’s the period was about five, about five years between those two things. And it gave me a chance to know myself a little better. And in that time my wife had both of our kids. And we, so I was, I be, I found myself in a new role as a father. And so I, so I was changing quite a bit as a person, and it made me think about like my role as a grader in the classroom.

Because that was a, as you said earlier, it’s a primary thing that we do. We can’t escape it as professors, as teachers. And it’s the one of the main things that we’re asked to do really, ultimately, that that stays on record in an institution. But I’ll tell you, it reminded me of one instance in that early period in my life that I don’t talk about in the keynotes. I feel like I can talk about it here which was very impactful to me around grading. Although the initial lessons that I got from it as a teacher were not about grading. This is how I didn’t understand the grading thing, but I do see it at grading lessons here.

So this was a summer course, after I finished, I was teaching in the summer at Oregon State University where I got my master’s and there was a an older student he was a male, he was in the timber industry before, he was coming back to be retooled. ‘Cause his job had been eliminated. There was no more timber to be cut. He was in his forties. I was in my early to mid twenties. I was, I think maybe 26. Right? So you can already see the problems i’m gonna have. I also looked incredibly young up into my thirties. I looked incredibly way younger than I, than I actually was.

So I would have, like my business attire, I would dress up in my khakis and my dress shoes and my buttoned up shirt. I couldn’t look like a student because I just looked like I was like 19 years old. And, so I give them this assignment to write about something that they care about, that this, all the things that I was told to do in this, it was a first year writing classroom. This student writes this incomprehensible essay to me. I don’t understand it. , But it’s clearly about something he cared about. There’s snippets that I can understand parts of it. There’s sentences that don’t even make sense, like I can’t even read the grammar. I don’t know. I, I don’t under, so we sit down, have a conference, and in the middle of this conference, he tells me this is my time in Vietnam. He’s like, I’m trying to process this thing. You told me to write about something. And I’m like, oh my God. I instantly realized I’m not prepared for this. I was not. This is, I’m not a counselor. And he is a man who at the time could have been my father, like that he is as old as somebody who might have been my father. And he’s crying in front of me and he’s just telling me. What do, so what do you want me to do? I don’t, and he’s weeping and I’m like, let’s pick another topic. Like that’s all I could.

And so I go to my director and talk to him about it and we worked out like how to redo the prompt. So I took the initial lessons of that, that this really difficult, and quite frankly, now I think about it, expected outcome. Eventually you’re gonna get something like this, right? When you ask for something personal and you care about. And then it assumes a professor who is in the position to be able to respond with some kind of ethos or authority with someone. I was not that in this position.

So, so that was the lesson I took was that, wait, I need to be much better about my prompting and what I’m, I’m not, I, I have to be very, I don’t, I can’t be your counselor. I, it’s not, and you need to be prepared to not talk about something. And I need to be okay with that. Today I realize that if it’s that way in this, in this hyperbolic case, it’s still that way, this blending of how do I judge the languaging of my students when it’s about anything. I mean, they’re writing about themselves and it’s coming out of themselves. And I’m judging by coming out of myself by using the languaging that I know. And those two things are often are not the same things. They do not come from the same worlds. And it’s very unfair and there’s no way for me to tell them, here’s how you need to be me in order to write for me, and I don’t want you to. But today I’d say, I don’t want you to be me, to write for me. I want you to be you and write to me, and then I’ll be me and write back to you. So that’s the grading lesson that I learned today. But at the time, I thought of it as a, how do I avoid this, this problem because I’m not the right person to talk to about that.

Sharona: Well, it seems to me, and I haven’t seen your writings on this, but one of the things you just said about people being able to write in their language and you being able to respond in yours. I have become aware. Relatively recently in my career. I’ve been in the classroom off and on for 35 years, but I’d say in the last five years, become aware of the issues with standardized academic language. Right? And yet I wonder, because again, this is not an area that I teach on. I teach on standardized mathematical language, which has its own set of similar issues. But how is that being impacted or how has that been impacted by the grading? And then also what about AI? Because AI is kind of trained, it seems like, in standard academic language.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah. And that has to do with the corpus that it’s drawing on to replicate.

Sharona: Yeah. So how’s that impacting what y’all who are writing, teaching people, because I am excellent, for a mathematician, at writing in a very standardized either academic language in certain cases, or business marketing language. ‘Cause I have an MBA in marketing too. Mm-hmm. So how does that all play out, both the grading and the languaging and then AI?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Well, I think AI one could say in a knee-jerk reaction that the emergence of accessible AI for people, large language model AI stuff, is, one could say that it has complicated this and made things like cheating and plagiarism, and stuff like that, much more easily re available. It also, as you said, replicates a white and middle class standardized or elite languaging that is pretty problematic. For, if we’re gonna use that as, let’s find the answer, what’s the right way to say this? Or how do we summarize this in a good way? And then it gives you that version of English only. That’s pretty problematic for me.

It also starts to do something that language doesn’t do. Which is, that is in, in the world, up to this point, language has not been static. It has not been homogenous. It is quite varied and diverse and heterogeneous, and it changes and evolves. And I really like the Russian linguist Volushinov, Valentin Volushinov. He says, this is around the second decade of the 20th century, I believe, he said language is always in the act of becoming. So, what he’s meaning is it’s evolving, it’s changing. You can’t ever see a, if you take a grammar book and you open it up and look at all the rules and things that describe, let’s say, English grammar, standardized English grammar, by the time that book’s out and you’re looking at it, some things are starting to shift and change. Practices. In the real world. We just deny those changes and say they’re fads or say they’re slang or say they’re some other, you know, it’s a tiny version that’s used over there, but not the standardized one that we’re supposed to hear on the radio or see on TV or whatever, or in a professional setting.

But that’s not true. That’s just simply ignoring the actual evidence in the world about people who use language. We are inevitably going to do that to language, and that’s ’cause language is alive and it’s supposed to meet the needs that real people have. So I think that AI is gonna do something with the language corpus that it gets, but I don’t know what that would be. I mean, who can say what that will be? It might end up mimicking the sort of dy dynamic evolving things that Volushinov talks about language doing with real people. But it may also be, like all print technologies, tend to sort of artificially look like it, it creates a static image of the language. Because it kind of does. But the language has moved on by the time that printed page or whatever is distributed or circulated.

So yeah, these are good I good questions. There’s good people working on them in the field. And I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of them. I certainly have lessons and activities in all of my classes around AI and we focus on first and foremost the ethical uses of them and how do we how do we articulate to our readers the way we use it, why we’re using the technology that way and what we think its ethical implications are. And I don’t mean like long discourses, I just mean some simple statements that I ask of students to explain.

Boz: So speaking of students, were you teaching this last spring or are you in the classroom?.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Okay. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was.

Boz: Two parts. Just kind of what are like some of the classes and different levels that you’re teaching and can you, without taking away anything from the keynote, can you kind of talk us a little bit through what the grading system actually looks like in whatever version of the class that you are either currently teaching or just finished teaching this last spring semester?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Sure. Yeah. Actually, my grading system is, this is essentially the same in any class, no matter what level it is. I mean, the details might be a little bit different, but the structure and this, and the policies and such are the same. So I’m so I can talk about them in any way you like. So I typically teach writing courses and these days, that is the last couple, three, four years, I mostly taught courses that serve students from across different majors that are looking to, they need an upper division writing course or communications course. So I’ve taught comm courses and English courses that are designated that way. Writing in the for the professions or writing in the professions. And and then of course first year writing, but I don’t teach a lot of that just based on what’s needed in my college right now. And persuasive writing which I teach much more as a class on judgment. The judgment of language as judgment and the judgment of language. And then I teach, I also have a shared appointment in the English department in another college where they have graduate students in my field. And so I teach graduate courses on composition, pedagogy and comp assessment, anti-racist assessment. I think I’m teaching a course next spring in 26 on writing program administration, which will deal a lot with assessment, but at the programmatic level as well as other stuff in writing program administration.

Boz: Yeah. Okay. Who, who would take that course? The student, but because that’s, yeah.

Dr. Asao Inoue: They’re grad, it’s graduate students, obviously. And they’re, they would take it, those who would take it would be rhetoric and composition folks. So those who would end up being, doing something like what I’m doing.

Boz: Okay.

Dr. Asao Inoue: So, but it’s a fairly large group in the sense of like the majors and such. But so yeah. That’s actually because writing programs are some of the largest programs in the nation across different universities and colleges because they teach so many courses, first year writing courses. Hmm. So they need a director or a coordinator or somebody to coordinate literally hundreds in one place, like ASU. We have, I think, three different writing programs that because of the college, our colleges and we have online, and they’re technically functioned separately. But just taking the one on the Tempe campus, that first year right program serves like tens of thousands of students a year.

Boz: Wow.

Dr. Asao Inoue: How many teachers you need. Yeah. And how many graduate students you need to staff some of those. So that’s, so a class, like a WPA class or writing program administration class, is pretty common these days. It used to not be, but over the last decade or so, it’s, it’s become much more common in, in rhetoric and composition departments or English departments and such.

Sharona: Because course coordination is more common, it sounds like in first year reading programs.

Dr. Asao Inoue: It is a common career path. You become a professor at someplace or whatever, and that’s one of the first things they’re gonna ask you to do is do you want to take a rotation As the director of composition, I’ve directed composition programs to write programs at three different universities. Wow. So, yeah. So, so everywhere they always ask, so.

Boz: Sounds like offline. You two need to talk. ’cause that’s Sharona, been doing course coordination for the last.

Sharona: I’m a first year math course coordinator.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sharona: But I wanna wanna know a little more. So how would you describe your grading system? Again, feeling free to avoid the keynote, so those people that are listening that are not yet signed up for the conference, come to the conference.

Dr. Asao Inoue: The good news is that the keynote focuses on a very particular thing about understanding why I’m doing this and how I got started with it. So I’m actually, my pedagogy, I don’t even get into very in detail about my grades.

Sharona: Great. Here you go.

Dr. Asao Inoue: So I can talk about it. So, so essentially I do labor based grading. And that means I don’t grade writing or anything in the classroom ever. So all those, no grades, no numbers, they’re not a part of it, a part of any of the assessment system or the grading system. Instead, I use a labor system. So, and it’s a lot of I have to trust students ’cause I don’t want to say keep track of your labor, which we do. I used to use labor logs, which I would give to the students and then they would. Keep them, fill them out. So there was certain bit of data that I wanted them to keep and then reflect upon that data, but there was a little confusion about whether they were going use that, whether I was going to use it as a way to grade them. Oh, you did 52 minutes on your right. That’s not enough. You get a B or a C. No, I’m not, I never did that. I never want to do that.

So I didn’t want it to look or sound like an accounting device. Instead, it’s a reflective device to be mindful about the labor you do in our class. So the main indicators of labor are did you turn it in on time? Does it meet the prompt in a very basic way, if I ask two questions, did you answer two questions? Doesn’t matter what you say about them, but did you answer them? And then if I ask for a word count a word, minimum, did you gimme 150 words on that that summary? Okay. 150 words, then regardless of what I think about it, that’s different. We’re gonna talk about that. I’m gonna respond, but that does not count towards how do I determine your grade on this? You get every assignment is, it’s either acceptable or it needs to be revised and turned in again. And then and students can, can do that at any time for any assignment in my classes.

So, we start this by using or I offer them what the last class like that negotiated with me and each other in terms of a labor contract for the grades. So the contract just stipulates what labor is, how we’re gonna calculate it, agree upon what are the numbers. So if it’s a face-to-face class, we might have participation in class. Like that means you were present in the class. So you can’t just miss all the classes. And then so we determine those numbers. We also determine, and how that will calculate in terms of the grade. We also determine if we’re going to use late assignments to count against you. What I do say is that I don’t assign anything that isn’t meaningful, or at least that I don’t think is meaningful. And we can determine whether that’s, that’s true for everybody or not. But because of that, you have to do everything. You don’t get to not turn something in. That ignoring assignments in my class tends to mean your grade drops really fast, even if it’s just one assignment. In, in, in the class. Typically I have a somewhere around 28 to 30 as individual assignments that count, that have to be tabulated in some way towards your grading contract in my class. And that’s and that’s over a course of a semester, yeah.

Sharona: So based on that, what is the distinction between a student who gets do you give a, a final letter grade, like a multi-level letter Grade A, B, C. So what distinguishes a student who gets an A from a student who gets a B? Like what?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Well, it will vary on how we negotiate it. Okay. So, so some classes will, it might be a little bit different, but generally speaking, there’s a table, at the end of my contract, that says, here’s basically the nuts and bolts, how I calculate what does an A mean, what does a B mean, et cetera. So it’s complete assignments, incomplete assignments, and ignored assignments mostly. In most cases. And so what is an incomplete assignment? It didn’t meet those requirements before, like it didn’t enter the prompts, but they can, you can, if it’s, if something’s labeled as incomplete, they can turn it in again. So it’s not a permanent mark, but it’s just telling you the status of that assignment. And if they don’t do anything about it, then it remains a mark against you on the contract.

So usually you can have, like, I think in the last course I taught this spring, it was a persuasion course, 300 level. They negotiated I think it was seven marks they could have as what was considered incomplete. So if you get seven marks over the whole semester you’re gonna go down from an A to a B. If you stay somewhere, anywhere in that seven mark thing, you are fine. You’re gonna, you’re gonna get an, the high grade, the highest grade possible. That’s what we’re always negotiating. And then it went down from there, a few more than that, and you’re gonna get a C. A few more than that, you’re gonna get a D et cetera. So.

Boz: And, and that’s something you, you, with your students negotiate at the beginning of the semester.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yes, I give them the, the contract that, that the previous class negotiated first and say, here’s what they negotiated. But this is our moment to first read it, understand it. Here’s a little bit of literature on what this practice is. So I ask them to look at what’s the, hi, the, just a short history of grading in, in the United States, and what does grading really mean and why are we doing it here? And what does it do for us as students in this class?

And then once we have reflected and thought about that and looked at our contract, we think about what does this mean and what do we think it will do for me? What do I need to do? What’s my role? So we do a little bit of reflection. This is all in the first week, week and a half. Then I, then I ask, is it still, is it fair enough? If it’s not, what do we need to change? Let’s vote on that. We vote on it. Super majority wins. And we institute that change in the contract. It has to meet the course goals also. In other words, we can’t say we don’t wanna have any necessary work, right? That can’t be an adjustment. ’cause that obviously means there’s no way for us to accomplish the goals in the class if we can’t prove the work we’re doing. So things like that can’t happen. But no student has ever asked that. And I’ve found all of my students have always been quite ethical and responsible about negotiating and what it means and what they’re hoping to get outta the class. And so those are the, the conversations that we have. We make the negotiations and then we use it at the midpoint. These days, it’s often at the two thirds point or somewhere in the last part of the class. We renegotiate. We look at the contract again. We look at the materials again and say, is this contract still fair enough? For us to, and once we have that reflection and thoughts, if we don’t have any changes to vote on, then it’s now, it’s no longer wet cement, it’s now cured. It’s now done. Right. It can’t be changed. And we ride to the end of the semester.

Boz: So from, from start to finish of getting that first draft of the contract. Because you said you did about a week, week and a half of diving into some of the history of grading and looking at what was the contract before, what is it about two weeks? It sounds like maybe?

Dr. Asao Inoue: It depends. So I teach a lot of online classes that are asynchronous also. Although it actually in a face-to-face class, it’s the same. I do simultaneous work. So we’re doing that while we’re also doing other work. But really that work, that understanding what our position is in the class, understanding how the grading mechanisms serve or don’t serve our learning purposes, is the learning work of my class. And it’s important for us to have those orientations as students, even if it seems like it’s just about the mechanics of the class. It’s really not. It’s negotiating how you are gonna interface with me, who’s your primary judge, if you will, in the grading system.

So I want us to be working together and I want students to feel like they own a good portion of, if not most, of the grading system. And that they feel in control and that they feel that they can have access, everyone can have access to every grade possible, not just up to, well, I’m not a good writer, so only I, maybe I can get a B if the teacher likes me. You know. It’s not a fair system if every student, no matter where they come from or who they are in my class, doesn’t have access to every possible grade. So that’s what I strive for.

Boz: I, I wanna put that on a t-shirt. But the reason I asked about the time, is because one of the things that Sharona and I have talked about several times is about the student understanding of the grading system and the student buy-in of the system. Mm-hmm. And I, I know I’ve never taken it with my high school students. I’ve never taken it as far as the details of the grading, but with other aspects of my class, having the students work with you and, and come to an agreement with you, I would bet you don’t have issues with student buy-in or student understanding of your grading system, do you?

Dr. Asao Inoue: I don’t have. Buy-in? No. Everyone, almost, even if they don’t, even if they’re a little reticent in the beginning or even throughout the entire course or if they, ultimately, I. Because, you know, I, I’m not looking to proselytize and make every student just like agree with me on everything. Right? Especially about how grades are created or maintained. But even if they don’t, they understand, oh, this is how fairness is constructed in this classroom. It’s constructed by me being a part of negotiating this contract of my labor counting more than a teacher’s idiosyncratic judgment of my languaging. And so that’s the fairness there. Seems very understandable as well as the student has much more control in that environment. And that’s what I try to emphasize is like, my job is not to control your behavior and who you are and what comes outta your mouth and what you write on a paper. My job is to help you have the most control of what you want out of this class, learning and of course the grade.

And those are two different things and I want us to understand what the difference is between them in this class, in this context. So that’s why we talk, that’s why I give them some materials about the history of grading and about judgment and things like that. And, there’s confusion, you know, there’s, it’s a lot to take in, I think for some students ’cause it’s a new system and they don’t, they’re still think, some are still thinking, well, okay, so is this what you want? Like, like, whoa, that’s the wrong que if you understand the grading system, you know, that is the wrong question to ask, but I understand where you’re coming from on that, right?

Dr. Asao Inoue: Many students desire to be ranked, they want to be ranked. They want that validation that way. And they feel that’s what education is about. And I’m trying to tell ’em education is the sweaty stuff you do outside the class and in the class that does all the learning, it’s the stuff that is, that’s the experiences of reading, of writing, of talking with peers, of going to the library, of doing all these other things. It’s not the letter grade, it is not my judgment of you. That may just be one little part of the conditions under which you get all those other things, but it’s not the learning.

So maybe we try to focus our efforts and create an environment that allows us to focus on that laboring. So that we can really be in the labor and really be mindful and thoughtful about what we’re learning and why we’re learning it, and why we feel so rushed and why I feel anxious about the class and about getting everything done and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I find those conversations to be so much more educational for my students. That is they learn so much more about themselves as learners, as people when they realize, oh, wait a minute, I’m not able to complete all this work because I have overstuffed my weekly schedule with so much things that i’ve created a recipe for failure in my academic life. Or, and there’s no way around it like that is I don’t have any other alternatives in my life. So, so what I’m saying is like, I don’t think it’s all that student’s fault necessarily, that they don’t have enough time, that they have to take a lot of shortcuts, that they have to take this load, they have to take care of their, their parents, they have to take care of children, they have to work all these things that, that equals not ideal for learning.

I’m struck by how systemic that is and it doesn’t surprise me that more and more students acknowledge and voice issues with anxiety, issues, with depression, issues with I don’t know if I can complete all the demands in my life, this class being just one of those demands. That’s heart heartbreaking to me. I mean, I can think about like education when you go into a learning environment, I think ideally you’d want to be able to be all in that and just be in the learning and forget about the world if you could. But you can’t when there’s food insecurity and housing insecurity and job insecurity and so forth. And so I think I think that’s really heartbreaking for me, but it’s also something that we have to talk about as a class that’s part of our negotiations.

It’s also part of, with those negotiations. I also negotiate with students or build a charter for compassion. So these are practices that we will do together. We also read a little bit about compassion in different disciplines, from philosophy to history, to political science to English and and literature. We look at different articulations and expressions of compassion and what it means. And then we build a list as long as we wanna make it, of compassion practices we promise to try to do in order to create a culture of compassion in the class. That’s from responding to each other’s work, to reading work together to engaging in conversations with me or with each other or doing the work of the class and a sustainable and ethical way.

So those things, and that has been a really important part of my class and those negotiations with the grading contract. And then. It becomes the threads. A a good portion of my students say that’s the thing that they take away is the compassion. That this is, it’s about, we’re thinking about now, I can do that in a language class. It may be a little easier sell to say we’re thinking about ourselves as human beings. And language is one really, really important part of being a human. And some would say it’s almost definitional of being a human. It’s part of the human animal to like communicate and articulate even if we do it very differently. And it defines us and so forth. And, and we use it to reflect upon things and we use it to make meaning in our world and understand our world and ourselves.

So that’s an easy sell in my class, in my classes to say, let’s pause frequently to just notice how we’re learning. To notice how we’re feeling when we’re reading this chapter. I I have this great set of assignments that I really love that many students don’t understand what it is until they do it over the course of the semester. Which is, we use Slack in the class, a private like messaging thing, and I’d say, okay, pause in this reading and slack a picture of your environment and tell me how you’re feeling. Don’t reveal anything about yourself or your environment you don’t feel comfortable revealing. But the point of this pausing is just to notice your labor. How are you feeling when you’re reading this or when you’re writing or when you’re trying to respond to colleagues? Where are you at?

Students discover some amazing things about themselves as laborers and learners, and they find out that up to that point, they hadn’t been terribly reflective or thoughtful about where they were doing their work, how they were doing it, or that their feelings that they were having in that moment, which are natural and appropriate, got in the way of the learning. They just swarm around, and they didn’t not like that assignment. They just were busy thinking about preparing dinner for their family when they were doing the assignment. And that got in the way, and that’s perfectly natural. And I think, okay. And I try to acknowledge that and help them understand that’s okay. Now that you know that, what’s the next step for you? How do you wanna use that information?

That starts with being able to be com compassionate with ourselves and with each other, and pausing a lot and noticing.

Boz: That is extremely interesting. And if you are willing to share any of those references that you use for the compassion stuff. I’m sure our listeners would love to actually see some of that.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah. Yeah. I’m happy to share that with you and you can.

Sharona: We’ll link them in the show notes.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah, that’d be great. There’s a burgeoning field that’s been around, that I’ve known for maybe the last 10 or 15 years around mindfulness and compassion in educational settings. And there’s a couple of really good books, I think, that look at compassion and mindfulness practices in classrooms across disciplines in a college setting that I think are really instructive. So it looks at practices that physics teachers and math teachers and English teachers and history teachers and so forth do. And so it crosses disciplines pretty nicely. But what I think you would notice, or what I notice at least, is how easily transferable these different practices are for any different kind of classroom with very different subjects and course goals and so forth. For me, all of that’s really

generative. Like, I see what a, what a physics teacher’s doing in their class and go, Ooh, I think I got an idea for like an English class, like with my class. Like, it’s exciting to me. I feel like I learn more from the stranger things, the farther afield from me than I do from the people next door to me, if that makes sense.

Sharona: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I have a comment and then a question. Yeah. So just in general, I want to comment that I’ve noticed that you use quite a few words in unusual ways. That I would not hear an academic standard. I have a friend and Bosley knows exactly who it is. If we could get Owynn Lancaster in a room with you, that would be, I would literally sit there with popcorn to, to listen to because he loves to change words as well. Yeah. And he understands a lot of the history of words. And so he’ll say things like Childrens with an s on the end because he’ll explain that children is already a triple plural. And so listening to you say languaging, I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m listening to Owynn. So I just had to make that comment. Owynn, if you’re listening but my question is sort of a very general, how’s that working for you? So how are you feeling about the labor-based grading in your classroom? Is it meeting the goals of what you hoped to do by changing your grading practices?

So once I did that, so many things changed in a positive direction for me in my classroom that I never went back. And the first thing that I noticed that changed was my relationships with my students and their writing dramatically changed. I used to say I learned so much from my students. I love reading their work, but I did only in the initial page. Midway through a stack of papers, back when there were stacks of papers, I couldn’t handle it anymore. It was like, all I feel like I’m doing is reading to justify the grade that I know that I have to give on this paper.

And so that was really troubling for me because I wanted to like this, I wanted to like students, right? I think that my the change in my relationship, the change in the way the classroom functioned was really instrumental. I don’t think I answered your question. So can you repeat your question?

Sharona: Well, I guess the question is, how’s it working now? Are your grades today accomplishing, or at least getting out of the way of, your goal.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yes, and there’s, there’s two ways that it does. One is the obvious way, which is that the grades are ranked hierarchical in ranking artificially, especially when it comes to language classrooms, and I don’t wanna do that and I don’t wanna participate in that kind of stuff. I think it does all kinds of bad things for students and it doesn’t help them psychologically. It only hurts them in terms of how they learn. And there’s lots of research that shows how grades do that kind of work and also how grades function or push against the sort of natural ways that humans think about the ranking when they get ranked or when they get judged. So that’s the first thing that I think it still works. It is functioning better ’cause I’ve improved and developed my practice over the last 20 or so years.

But the second thing that I think was more, most important to me, I. Or that is important to me that it changed was that it allowed my classrooms, my students, and myself to have different conversations about their writing about themselves and about grading as a judgment practice more generally. That is, it gave us a way to be critical about the systems of education that screw them over. And so that’s what I was hoping to be able to have. It’s not the point of my classes, right? But when a student wants to have that conversation, the environment is ready for it. It has allowed them to have it in an honest way. Even when they say, no, I still wanna be graded, I still like grades it, the grades serve me really well, and I don’t wanna give that up. I’m not gonna tell them to give that up, even if I don’t think it is the case. I think it’s like, I think you, maybe you’re being fooled a little bit, but I’m, you know, I’m not them. I’m not on their journey. I can’t, so I think that we can still have that conversation in a much more honest way. And we could, and they get to reveal it to me. And then in a perhaps more honest way that to say, you know, I don’t buy your system. I don’t buy it. Like, it’s not gonna prepare me in the ways that I think I need to be prepared.

And my response is, okay. You’ve had maybe 15 weeks of this and you’ve had 16 years of the other way. I see why you would think that, and I think you’re wrong, but that’s okay. We don’t have to agree on that. In order for you to prosper and succeed in this class, in order for me to learn something from you, you don’t need to believe what I believe.

Boz: So that’s really interesting. ’cause I’ve told this story several times, but the first time that I tried true alternative grading, it was a disaster. I did so many things wrong.

Sharona: Did you try or did I require you to try?

Boz: No, because we, we came to a lot of those things together. We did. But the one thing that sold me and that I would never even consider going back to traditional grading was it changed my conversation with my students. Now, the conversation I was having, I had a different goal for that conversation than your goal. But it was still the conversation with the students. It was that conversation at the end of the semester of, Mr, how do I get more points, Mr. How many more points do I need to go from a C to a B to actually about the mathematics. You know, what do I need to show you about my understanding of p values? So I find it interesting that you, even though the conversations were very, very different, it was still the conversation in that relationship myself.

Dr. Asao Inoue: That’s interesting and I can see how that’s an important product of your discipline of the classes you’re teaching, math and things like that. When I think about what kind of conversations do I wanna really have with students generally and that come out of, say, the grading environment that is, that it either encourages it or doesn’t. I think it is. I, I’m really for, I think you’re probably gonna agree with this ’cause I ’cause it’s, it’ll be obvious. I, I think that educational systems have it wrong. We tend to create systems, at least actually from K through 12 all the way to through college. We create systems of competition, artificial competition, and grades are a big part of that. We create rankings and GPAs and we say, only the ones with the highest stuff get access to X, Y, and Z and so forth.

And I think that’s really, really problematic. It, it’s like you got a whole bunch of resources and you scrape off just this one part that you really like and you say, that’s the resources we’re gonna use and we’re gonna forget about all those other resources. Whatever those resources are. And I think that is what we do in education. So for me the conversations I wanna have, I don’t wanna proselytize, I don’t wanna tell students to believe what I believe. I just want them to ask the questions about the systems. So for me, it is about understanding the right questions to ask about the systems that manipulate us and that create us. Part of those, one of them, one obvious one in a language classroom or in any classroom, are the grading systems.

It’s not the only thing that does that, but it’s, but grading is such an easy, tangible thing because it, they know it and they feel that all they all the time so they can talk about grading because they’ve got so many experiences with it.

They have a harder time probably talking about the ways in which the language around them slowly and tacitly disciplines them to believe and be oriented in the world in particular ways. In ways that harm them and harm the people around them in ways that make them think they gotta compete against the person next to them for a better grade or for more resources or for the job, when in fact, the better world would be where they actually help that person get the job and not themselves. And when they do that, all of a sudden there’s gonna be more jobs and stuff. And I’m not being mystical or magical about it. I’m just saying like, this is the ideology that I really do believe that, I think that we have it all wrong. We have it, we live in systems, capitalist systems that intrinsically are about inequality and that function on that basis, and on the basis of artificial scarcity. You gotta create the scarcity or the sense of it and then everyone scampers for the few nuggets of whatever. And I think that the human intellect, languaging, and humanity is way bigger than that. It’s almost infinite, at least in the way we could experience it. And I know that sounds kind of metaphysical or kind of pie in the sky or whatever, but I really don’t care. I don’t know how else to explain it.

Sharona: I guess I would say it sounds somewhat rhetorical, in sense of I’m talking to a rhetoric professor.

Dr. Asao Inoue: But I, but I really mean it in a human sense, a humane sense. I, I mean, we could exercise our humanness in so much bigger and broader ways that we just artificially restrict. And part of that artificial restriction is the systems we work in and that we take for granted. That is, we just assume are natural. That naturalize so much stuff about us. And it starts in school where you get disciplined in particular habits, and then you go out in the world and think that’s the truth when it’s not necessarily, it’s just one part of how the world has created you as you and me as me and so forth.

So anyway, I mean, I know it’s what I’m thinking about or what I’m wanting to have, the conversations I’m wanting to have with students, are really at this most core is just questioning the naturalness of the natural world that they think they experience. And, and the place I focus on are the systems that create that.

Boz: Yeah. And you’re right, grades, while not the only one, definitely one of the bigger ones and one of the very easily tangible. And I could see why that has such a huge part in those conversations.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah, and I mean, students react to this as well. I mean, in different ways, in a positive light. That is, when you take grades out of the classroom, that is a teacher assigning grades. You don’t take away the judgments, the the evaluations. You still give those evaluations. Like, here’s what I think you’re doing well, here’s what I think you could improve on, those kinds of discussions. You still have those, but when you take the grades out, the ranking and that hierarchical assessment students, at least in my classes, language classrooms, what I hear every semester are how much freer they feel. Just taking grades out. They all of a sudden feel like, oh, I can learn in such a different way and it feels better.

And, I think joy should be a big part of any educational journey. It shouldn’t be painful. I mean, I don’t mean that it can’t be uncomfortable. There’s lots of development and learning that needs to be uncomfortable ’cause we’re learning new things and we’re trying to, we’re changing things, but that still can be a joyful act. One that gives you a deep sense of purposefulness and joy, that you’re connected to the people around you, that you might be able to change the world in some a beautiful way, or that you might be able to express something that somebody else couldn’t express before. Those things can’t be done in an environment of competition and an environment of strict strictness that says everyone’s gotta do it this predefined way, or that you feel that that’s the case because of the grading mechanisms. So.

Boz: Well this has been an absolute blast. Unfortunately, we are coming up on time really quickly. I think we could easily go on for another hour, but I did want to real quickly ask you about some of your books. I know you’ve got several out there. Where can people find them? What is, you know, the newest one that you have out? Or do you have anything about to come out that you wanna kind of tease a little?

Dr. Asao Inoue: So sure. I mean, the best place to look for most of my books, or at least a good portion of them, is the WAC Clearinghouse. And it’s an online resource for they, they publish a, they’re an academic publisher and they also archive lots of academic journals in my field and in writing across the curriculum, of the field of writing across the curriculum, so the book, and the reason I go with that publisher is because it offers them open access for free. As well as you can buy the printed version if you want.

But anyone who wants to read a PDF version or an epub or a Kindle version, you can just download it from the website. So all of those books are there. All of my my single author books are there. And a few of the collections and co-edited collections are also there as well. For free, if that’s what folks want. The one, if I were to say, where do you wanna start, if you’re thinking about grading, Labor-Based Grading C ontracts. That book is the first one probably to start, I just, let’s see, last year, I think, I published a response to some criticism of that.

Sharona: I was curious about that one.

Dr. Asao Inoue: Yeah. And then it, and, and so I took that, that criticism to heart. It had to do with incorporating the literature on neurodivergency as well as disability. And so, and it really helped expand and helped me rethink some of the practices in there. And then, so that book is, is doing that. It’s, it’s sort of renovating in, in my way, my own way of renovating the, the it, the practice of labor-based grading, using that literature and those good criticisms of the practice.

The next thing I have an, an, if you’re interested in, in the conversations in a classroom around the intersections of race and language and white language supremacy in language. That book is Above the Well, and it’s sort of a little bit autobiography of my own languaging history, and it’ll explain why I use words in different ways. If you, so but it also, so it’s, it, that book is that, and it’s also an argument for why we all live in the white language supremacist environments all the time, and always. And so it’s really made it, I wrote it as these are the kinds of conversations I want to have in first year writing classrooms with first year writing students in college. So, think of it maybe think of it that way.

The book I’m currently working on and have been working on for the last couple of years is really more of a guide for early teachers or teachers who are interested in or like TAs, graduate students and early teachers in their career who are interested in understanding better and making connections with race and language and racism and language. So that it’s really thinking about, it frames it all as orientations to the teaching of language and the learning of language. So what does a teacher need to really understand to have a good orientation towards language and its learning.

It’s focus primarily is around race and racism and think about that, although that’s not all that it does, it’s a pretty big book. I didn’t expect it to be so big, but it ended up being really, really big. So, so it moves from histories of languaging, particular racial formations. Like African American and black and Asian and white and Latino or what I call Latine. And then also a whole chapter on judgment, a chapter on anti-racist grammaring, how to teach grammar in anti-racist way or from an anti-racist orientation, thinking about that. And then connecting language and language slash rhetoric with race and racing as pro historical processes. So those are the first couple chapters. And then I have a chapter that looks very carefully at framing our orientations to teaching language around Marxist dialectic and the earlier philosophical traditions that that came out of, which is Hegelian style philosophical work. So, great. So it, it’s covering a lot of territory and it’s probably doing too much, but I can’t, I can’t. I

Sharona: I linked a bunch of those to the WAC Clearing House so that people don’t have to use our Amazon affiliate links and Right, which we do have, and we’re very, we disclose them, we say, Hey, if you click here, it’s probably an Amazon link, but yours does not. Yours says, these are coming from the WAC Clearinghouse. So.

Boz: Well, I, I, I wanna thank you Sharona. Do you have any last minute comments or things before we start wrapping this up?

Sharona: Just thank you so much for coming onto the podcast, and giving us an hour of your time. I hope that people find this conversation just as enjoyable as I did.

Boz: And I wanna echo that. I also want to say just how much I am looking forward even more now since having this conversation and getting to know you a little bit. But I really am looking forward to that keynote, again, he’s the opening day keynote. If you haven’t already registered, go out there, get registered.

And I also want to just put an open invitation, especially when that book that you were talking about, when it, when it does come out or when you’ve got a publication date, if you want to come back on and talk in more detail about that book. ’cause that sounds phenomenal, especially if it is new educator oriented. I think that’s one of the really big keys is starting to really attack any kind of educational reform at the pre-service level, at the early service level. That’s the only way we’re ever gonna make real change at scale, in my opinion, is. We’ve gotta start getting it into the education of our educators.

Dr. Asao Inoue: So, yeah, I, I absolutely agree. I think that’s kind of what my experience as an educator has also sort of taught me is that there’s a lot of stuff that historically we just haven’t trained ourselves in. And we need to think about what really will help a teacher do the work they need to do in the classroom. Yeah. So, so thank you so much. Yeah. And I definitely will happy to keep you abreast of that when it comes out, I’m, I’m, I mean, if I’m being honest about that book I probably could have submitted it already to the publisher. I’m just really cautious about it. I don’t know why. I just wanna, I want to get it right. I want to get all of it right. So.

Boz: It, it sounds like it, it’s a, a great framework and everything else, so I, I definitely look forward to it. Cool. And wanna thank everybody. We hope to see you at the conference in June, and we’ll see you back here next week for our 100th episode.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.