Facilitator: Casey Patterson, PhD candidate, Department of English

The disciplines of Black, Women’s, and Ethnic Studies entered the university as expressions of student protest, when students were demanding “relevant education” and “education for liberation.” So how are we, as extensions of that protested authority, supposed to teach a curriculum which should always be premised on questioning us? In the design of my Winter 2023 class, “Black Feminism and the Sci-Fi of Octavia Butler,” I included two experimental assessment structures: a “Joint Assessment” process which adapted “contract grading” and “ungrading” frameworks to structure metacognitive self-assessment as an equal component of students’ final grades for the class; and a Collective Final Exam which called upon students to cooperatively define questions, methods, and answers to frame our learning for the quarter.

In this session, we will review the implementation of such assessments, and discuss how each of us can develop allied methods in our own contexts.