Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

@jessifer.bsky.social

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Irascibly optimistic. Ungrading. Critical Digital Pedagogy. Professor at U of Denver. Owner of PlayForge. Co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy. Author of Undoing the Grade and An Urgency of Teachers. One of Hazel’s dads. he/him. https://www.jessestommel.com

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Don’t publicly throw students under the bus. Don’t generalize about students for laughs. If you’re a teacher (or anyone). Really shouldn’t be necessary to say this.

“The work of teaching, the work of reimagining assessment, is necessarily idiosyncratic.” www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2...

English alum flunks grades in new bookwww.colorado.edu Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop.

A new interview with me about my recent book: "University of Colorado English alum flunks grades in new book: Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop..." www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2...

English alum flunks grades in new bookwww.colorado.edu Jesse Stommel compiles two decades of eyebrow-raising in Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Re: 15) Yes, include contingent faculty as well as staff, but ensure that it’s paid labor. A local uni does include adjuncts in multiple levels of shared governance, but I opted out of attending department meetings in large part because it was unpaid labor, so other uses of my time won out.

15) failing to include adjuncts, contract faculty, and staff in department meetings or shared governance 16) using tenure as a compliance mechanism by telling academics to wait until they have tenure before they: publish on/in… talk about… teach outside prescribed norms, etc.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Academic libraries should be open to everyone, not just students and professors.

Some examples of academic gatekeeping: 1) telling someone their research “doesn’t count” 2) excluding adjuncts/staff from professional development or funding 3) drawing arbitrary disciplinary boundaries to exclude people 4) reinforcing faculty/staff hierarchies 5) defaulting to blind peer review

Lots of useful additions to this list in the comments and quoted tweets. 20 examples, and there are dozens more. Gatekeeping is insidious in academia. We should be helping each other make our work better, rather than insistently policing turf.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

As an adjunct, I personally enjoyed when my school passed a Senate resolution to say we weren’t allowed to call ourselves “adjuncts” anymore. “Sessional lecturer” is the new term that makes sure we don’t have the reserved term “professor” in our title.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

So there was this "games and learning" grant at a college I taught for. And when I asked about applying for one, they told me adjuncts couldn't get "paid" on a grant, because faculty could only be paid in "release time", which doesn't apply to adjuncts.

“Of course he forgot,” is a whole genre of gatekeeping, but also, yes, if it didn’t happen in the U.S. it doesn’t exist is an all too common form of gatekeeping.

Of course he forgot the favourite type of gatekeeping by US academics: If it was not published in the US (preferably by someone in the US), it does not exist.

I keep waiting anxiously for someone to attempt to discredit me for mis-numbering my thread. That kind of pedantic behavior is its own mode of (sadly too common) gatekeeping.

5) saying online/hybrid/lab/recitation teaching isn’t “real” teaching 6) drawing lines re: what publications “count,” especially when what “counts” are closed-access publications from for-profit publishers that expect volunteer labor from writers and reviewers

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

This is a great list of examples of gatekeeping *within* academia. Related: excluding people from a scholarly community if they work in another industry. I left the university, I didn't leave the discipline

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

The number of research-related professional development opportunities that are closed to staff is incredibly frustrating

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Reply to

Paul Gowder

Also just jumping in to say “anonymous review” is a good, non-disability-connected term for the same practice.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

There's simultaneously an expectation that people outside of the tenure-track continue to write/behave as scholars and publish accordingly, but also that they're at best second-class if they choose to do so. (I personally don't think they should, but that's me).

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

My one-time boss told me "If you're writing it means you don't have enough to do."

Yes, every word here.

Having adjuncts period is academic gate keeping. Most college courses are taught by highly trained people who don’t get paid enough to survive and have no opportunities for advancing their career. Tenured professors could’ve put a stop to it.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

I am seriously seeing my college in several of these steps. We hemorrhage science faculty due to insufficient pay, lack of support and overly high expectations.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Thread with (suggested) examples of academic gatekeeping. In my experience there’s other kinds of gatekeeping in other endeavours. Over the last too many years I’ve felt* gatekept** out of both science & science writing 😞 (Click on the shared post, then scroll back to the top to read the thread.)

19) instrumentalizing teaching by reducing it to a set of concrete practices or labor devoid of context, philosophy, history, etc. 20) failing to adequately support, compensate, champion teachers, teaching, and pedagogy.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

These are great/terrible & I would add: - credit caps on adjunct faculty (to avoid benefits) - using summer classes as an income booster for full timers - postdocs limited to 2 years from degree

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Also: excluding adjuncts and contract teachers from faculty unions Excluding Adjunct and part time staff from faculty and staff medical clincs

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Reply to

Zeb Larson

Losing the institutional library access is such a big issue. It makes everything so fucking hard. Even tho I can pay for access to the nearest big uni library (and the fee isn't bad), I can't access most ebooks so I need to physically go to the library.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

#1 is the lot of almost every humanities-trained researcher on a health sciences campus.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

I have a set talk I give with my students, each of whom has had to face a moment when someone who was kind and helpful to them harmed others very badly. It's not one I give AFTER the fact now, but on Day 1: We work with professionally charming people. People are capable of great good AND harm.

It's reassuring. But it's probably not always true. Predators can and do manipulate the people around them, and I think an important part of victim advocacy is being able to say, “I didn't see a red flag, but I still believe the people who were hurt.”

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

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DrAl.bsky.social

Thanks again @jessifer.bsky.social! /2 youtu.be/HQ27Pt0pvYM

Undoing the Grade | Dr. Jesse Stommelyoutu.be Dr. Jesse Stommel unpacks his book, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to StopTopics:0:00: Intro6:21: How the book came to be12:01: Understanding your ...

If your students are struggling, stop asking what might be wrong with or different about them. Start by asking what barricades the system has erected. How is structural stuff getting in the way? Knock down those barricades before putting blame on students... or yourself.

Toward a Co-intentional Approach to Assessmentwww.jessestommel.com For ungrading to be equitable, we can’t merely ask students to grade themselves, but must work together with students to interrogate and dismantle grades as a system.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

Grading is not an evidence based practice and is also cop shit. Which makes sense given that policing is also not an evidence-based practice.

If we did away with grades, we’d also eliminate the massive markets for proctoring, learning management systems, plagiarism detection, and more. The insidious culture of grades is propping up a multibillion dollar surveillance edtech market. Ungrading means working to dismantle that entire system.

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Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

I've been leaning into different grade schemes came up with a hybrid system. I use UnGrading for participation. The process causes some students anxiety, but I find it a) more useful to students (they ID spots for improvement and set goals to achieve it) and b) fairer than assigning it myself.

"We have to start by seeing students as full humans, fully acknowledging their context and history. This requires structural change. Students can't be rows in a spreadsheet."

Ungrading for Equitywww.jessestommel.com Ungrading is an equitable practice because grades do harm. And marginalized students are the ones most harmed by grades. Finding ways to reduce that harm is imperative if equity or justice is our goal...

"Teachers are rightfully skeptical of approaches to assessment that create a culture of suspicion and competition, while further fracturing the already strained relationships between students, between teachers, and between students and teachers."

Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stophybridpedagogy.org Ungrading means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply not grading. The word, "ungrading," is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices...