Labor-Based Grading as Liberatory Sociology

Elena Alvarado-Strasser

Professor of Sociology

City College of San Francisco

Race is omnipresent in my classroom. From my social location as a white female instructor, to the readings I assign, and the images used in my slides. As Beverly Tatum has so skillfully described it, [race and] racism is like the smog in the air, and we breathe it constantly.

There is an abundance of good writing and research about how to challenge race and racism in the classroom. However, there is one area of the classroom where race and racism perniciously linger, impervious to my re-structuring and sabotaging many of my other anti-racist efforts: grades. Grades disrupt my attempts to foster strong relationships with my students; they reinforce stereotype threat with more fierceness than my attempts to negate it; grades insist on my authority and superiority despite my most dogged attempts to democratize my classroom.

This tension is all too familiar to composition professor and researcher Asao Inoue in Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (2019). Inoue argues that our standards of “quality” (and all of the judgements therein) reflect a white racial habitus; whiteness provides the normative backdrop of our assessment resulting in the reinforcement of white supremacy. Indeed, multiple scholars in the field of composition have found that the academic discourses practices in schools end up reifying and privileging certain racial and class hierarchies (Hull and Rose, 1990; Heath, 1982; Rose, 1989).

Therefore, Inoue argues that grades based on qualitative assessment do not assess ability or skill, but rather proximity to whiteness. The aforementioned description is obviously a limited description of Inoue’s research, but the premise is intriguing: how do constructions of race shape our grading? Not just how implicit bias or stereotypes shape how we view our students, but rather in constructing the very standards we use to assess?

Inoue’s suggested solution is the use of labor based contracts. Contract grading determines a student’s grade based on the completion of a contract (contract grading review). Labor based contract grading goes one step further, for the components of the contract are based on the students’ labor only, not the qualitative assessment of their work. Inoue measures this labor by time spent working. Assessing based on labor, Inoue argues, is less a proxy for race and is more accessible to everyone¹. Obviously, the teacher can and should give feedback towards helping the student more effectively develop their ideas, but that feedback is disassociated from the grade.

Since Inoue’s labor-based contract is part of a classroom environment which performs constant meta-cognitive reflection on the relationships between discourse, race, and power, would it make sense in a sociology course?

I’m in the process of finding out. I instituted a labor-based contract for my Introduction to Sociology course this semester. I had this hunch that whiteness still haunted my grading scheme: in the way that students had to “prove” to me that they knew and mastered the material, that they did so in an “appropriate” language, or that they had to produce something that was “worthy” of a specific grade. It reeked, not only of capitalism and neoliberalism, but also of hierarchy and hegemony. I reflected that if my grading practices, which are often central to the student’s experience (Cox, 2009), reflected white supremacy, then all my other attempts to mitigate racism in my classroom would fall flat.

Using labor-based contract grading, I can focus on the experience of sociological thinking. Students don’t need to “prove” they know the material, nor do they need to perform intelligence or proficiency in a specific way; they just need to write 250 words. They don’t worry that they don’t “get it”, they just have to try their best to talk it out for half a page. When I have conferences with students about their work, we can actually discuss their ideas instead of the tired “how do I fix this paper, so I can get an A?”

In this way, labor-based contract grading has (so far) helped me truly pursue the real liberatory nature of sociological study. Sociological thinking ignites with the freedom to think and explore instead of performing. Additionally, because I am not constantly evaluating (and trying to mitigate the power dynamics associated with it), I have the space and time to engage with my students as complete people and thinkers, which, ironically, is the exact kind of relationship that racism takes from us. Labor-based contract grading is not the end of racism in my classroom, but it is a strong start towards that end.

¹I have some questions and discomforts with Inoue’s argument, but I do not think that these objections are enough to reject the entire experiment of labor based contact grading.

References

Tatum, Beverly D. 1997. Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race.

New York: Basic Books.

Hull, Glynda, and Mike Rose. 1990. “This Wooden Shack Place’: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading.” College

Composition and Communication 41(3): 287-298.

Heath, Shirley Bryce. 1982. ‘What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School.” Language in Society 11(1):

49-76.

Rose, Mike. 1989. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of American’s Educationally

Underprepared. New York: Free Press.

Inoue, Asao B. 2019. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing

Classroom. Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse.

Cox, Rebecca D. 2009. The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.