⏤ 🟡 DRAFT – EARLY WORK IN PROGRESS 🟡 ⏤
Summary: Learning is an organic process, not a rote product. Students deserve for their efforts, strategies, progress, and pathways to be seen, valued, and reflected back to them — not erased or reduced to a single measure.
Description: Traditional grading often makes learning invisible. Student work vanishes into a void: turned in, scored, and returned with little acknowledgment of the process. Students rarely see peers’ work or have chances to narrate their own struggles and strategies. This invisibility breeds demoralization, convincing students their effort is “busywork” or judged opaquely.
GOAL makes process visible, but without collapsing it into raw labor-time or quantity. Carillo (2021) demonstrates that labor-based grading, while equity-driven, often privileges able-bodied and neurotypical norms, assuming labor is neutral. Dolmage (2017) reminds us that retrofitting access is insufficient — structures must anticipate diverse ways of working. Price (2011) shows how norms of speed, presence, and rational performance can exclude students with mental disabilities.
In light of these critiques, GOAL expands visibility from “labor” to pathways: drafts, strategies, reflection, collaboration, multimodal engagement, and the ways students connect coursework to their lived realities. Making these pathways visible not only affirms student effort but builds classrooms as communities of scholarly practice.
Core Practices
- Invite students to document and reflect on their processes (e.g., learning journals, process memos, multimodal reflections).
- Use assessment formats that surface growth: drafts, annotations, revision notes, oral walkthroughs.
- Highlight not just time-on-task, but diverse strategies and forms of engagement.
- Build in low-stakes opportunities for students to narrate what was easy, what was hard, and how they approached their work.
- Encourage peer sharing that emphasizes pathways and connections, not just polished products.
Reflective Questions
- What dimensions of process do I currently see — and what remains invisible?
- Am I equating equity with hours of labor, or am I honoring diverse pathways to learning?
- How do my assessments affirm student effort and growth, not just outcomes?
- Do students have meaningful opportunities to talk about their work, not just submit it?
Lineage & Influences
- Inoue (2019, 2022) reframes grading around labor, opening critical space for process-centered equity.
- Carillo (2021) critiques labor-based grading for privileging normative bodyminds and urges broader visibility beyond labor hours.
- Dolmage (2017) warns that retrofitting is insufficient, pressing for proactive recognition of diverse processes.
- Price (2011) demonstrates how norms of presence, speed, and rational performance erase or disadvantage students with mental disabilities.
- Elbow (1993) encourages appreciating student work as the foundation of growth.
- CAST’s UDL framework (2018) emphasizes multiple means of action and expression, requiring attention to varied learning pathways.