Labor-Based Grading

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, many contingent faculty in rhetoric and composition have found that their teaching praxis (theory and/or practice) inadequately meets the diverse needs of growing writers and researchers across disciplines. Writing instructors, particularly contingent faculty, in higher education should consider labor-based grading or contract grading as a viable teaching praxis that better meets the needs of students who bring into physical and virtual classrooms a host of diverse perspectives, worldviews, and backgrounds and who desire inclusive spaces that foster discursive, visual, bodily, spatial, and material alternative expressions. Though not a new teaching praxis (Elbow, 2000; and Inoue; 2022), labor-based grading and/or contract grading, as West-Puckett et.al (2023) note, disrupts the conventional notions of writing assessment which is predicated upon “(racist, sexist, ableist) notions of quality” of writing (p. 153 – 154). As a result of such marginalizing assessment practices, students are unable to see writing as a recursive (rhetorical) process that can potentially lead to social action (Miller, 1984; Haas 2012). As such, this teaching tool is an example of labor-based grading for an online business and industry course for faculty to use as a framework in re/inventing curriculum design not only for this course but in other courses where one’s current teaching praxis may feel less impactful or less relevant in light of our current cultural, social, political, and academic context.