Moving Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: Transformative Aspects of Contract Grading and Pedagogy

Moving Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries:

Transformative Aspects of Contract Grading and Pedagogy

Stuart Paul Duncan

It does not surprise me that within academia, at least here at Yale and in my previous experiences that we live in a world defined, to a large extent, by fairly well set disciplinary boundaries. From my perspective, graduate students tend to respond to these boundaries in one of three ways: there are some who prefer to live closer to the liminal spaces between discrete “subjects”; there are those who like to keep more centrally located, away from such boundaries; and then there are those who like to take a leap of faith, crossing the border fully into uncharted territory.

While this may seem oversimplified, and I do admit to a radical generalization, my experience as a teacher here and at Cornell has led me to personally experience the Ivory Tower mentality with its series of entrenched and well-marked disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries are often fiercely guarded and promoted on grounds not limited to tradition, politics, and gender. My task here is not to argue the extent of such disciplinary boundaries, their level of entrenchment, or their validity—although I'm sure you can infer my position on such matters. Instead, my concern is over how such boundaries promote a content-based mentality that overwrites broader educational concerns and, more importantly, how this presents challenges for the Yale Teaching Center.

It is while reflecting on my initial experience at the YTC—both as a participant and as a facilitator—that these disciplinary boundaries come to the fore The prevailing mentality reveals an active majoring holding fast to disciplinary exclusivity; i.e., that “my” subject is special and these broader pedagogical ideas (active learning, backwards design, etc.) do not directly address issues within “my” discipline. This resistance is understandable when one considers that new graduate student teachers have been immersed in their discipline for several years of coursework, if not longer, harkening back to their undergraduate years. Such immersion serves to reinforce disciplinary exclusivity.

            There seems to be some unwritten expectation that as graduate students, we are already fully equipped to teach or lead a class. Yet, if we had wanted to teach at the pre-college level, many of us would have had to complete a teaching certificate, backed up by extensive assistant teaching, or even a master’s degree in education, before being allowed to lead a class. Perhaps at the university level, because it is assumed that we are “experts” in our field, this educational training is not necessary. I would question that, although we may be proto-experts at our fields, we are not equipped to teach beyond a “content” mentality, a mentality that reinforces disciplinary discreteness. Without prior teaching experience, or a pedagogical framework within which to shape our teaching, we become passengers in the passive act of transmitting disciplinary content, rather than active agents that enable and shape our student’s learning process.

            The YTC’s Fundamentals of Teaching courses, often not obligatory in many departments, can only scratch the surface of many of the pedagogical challenges we face as instructors. One of complex challenges faced by the YTC is aiding new graduate teachers in their transformation from a content-only subject-defined mentality—instantiated through disciplinary territoriality—to a broader pedagogical perspective. Such a perspective brings a deeper understanding of non discipline-specific pedagogy that makes us more effective teachers.

            This is not to say that there isn't value in the content of our subject areas. Broadening my knowledge of Bach’s cantatas, Beethoven’s sonatas, Wagner’s operas, and Radiohead’s fascinating metric idiosyncrasies has provided and will continue to provide a source of inspiration. Yet, as much as I enjoy teaching what I love, my most profound teaching experience came not from a successful semester of well-structured course content, but from the act of grading while teaching at Auburn Correctional Facility, an all-male maximum security prison in upstate NY.

            Grading? Seriously? How can the topic of grading provide the basis for a more profound teaching experience than the bread and butter of my training, i.e. music? What was so profound, then, you may ask? The act of grading is one of several power dynamics that separate instructor and student, and often acts as a form of a judgment. In a prison environment, those interred are ultra-sensitized to power dynamics. Being stripped of their individuality through the clothes they wear and the personal freedoms that are suppressed, inmates are constantly reminded that others hold power over them. It is with this context in mind that I was particularly sensitive that the act of grading held power over them in the same way that the guards held power—inhibiting, rather than enabling student learning.

            In order to avoid the association of grades and judgment, or perhaps more clearly, to avoid the association of grades with my assessment of the student, I decided to try a form of contract grading. Rather than setting a midterm exam, I met with each student individually during class time and went over his progress during the semester. After establishing the goals they have already achieved, we discussed what their aims were for the rest of the semester in light of my original course goals. Together, we came up with a tailor-made roadmap that took into account the needs of a course grade (reflecting the skills and goals deemed necessary for the course) and the student’s own personal goals. These goals were tiered into the traditional grading format of As, A-, B+, etc. Then after agreeing that the various grade-level goals were both fair and achievable, the student signed the contract the following week. This was the first stage in giving them an identity and control over their learning process. At the end of the course, I asked all the students to go over their contracts and grade themselves based on the contracts that they had signed. All students, except one, graded themselves exactly as I would have, to within one half-grade.

            It wasn't until after the final class that the power of contract grading hit home when one of the students said that, for the first time, he had felt like a human being. Holding back my emotions, I asked him what about the course had helped him to feel this way. He said, “everything in here is about taking away our identity. Music has helped me to find myself again, and the ability to take responsibility for my own learning has given me a power and confidence I thought I would not see before I die.” Though music no doubt played an important role as the subject content, it was the simple employment of contract grading that had a profound effect on the student, one that could have been achieved regardless of subject content.

            It is this experience that has led me to write this blog post. It is not my intention to critique the current state of academia, with its eclectic nature of subject-boundaries, but to encourage the benefits of thinking about how we teach, not what we teach, and more importantly to highlight how we want our students to leave our courses transformed. Although a maximum security prison may present an environment where there is more to gain from employing non-subject specific pedagogical approaches, all students, regardless of the function of the walls that surround them, benefit from a course primed to ask how they want their students to think differently by the end of the semester. It is in this vein that the YTC programming has the potential to enable both new and experienced instructors to move beyond the subject-specific content reinforced by disciplinary boundaries and to infuse their teaching with the hows rather than the whats.