Time and Date: Tuesday December 6, 9:30 PM BJT

Speaker: Susan D Blum, Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

Zoom: 998 5236 6345

Abstract

In this talk, Susan D Blum introduces some of the principles behind the growing practices united under the umbrella of “ungrading”–calling into question the centrality of conventional grading practices. She also talks about many concrete practices that she and others use to implement ungrading–leading to greater learning, engagement, and equity.

Bio

Susan D Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, currently fixated on education and pedagogical praxis, after a previous incarnation as a China anthropologist. She is the author of “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College (Cornell, 2016) and My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Cornell, 2009), and the editor of the recent volume Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (West Virginia University Press, 2020). With 5 co-authors, she has written “A Theory of Public Higher Education,” imagining public higher education created from scratch, published in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal in July 2021 (Korstange et al., 2021). Her new manuscript, Challenging Schoolishness, is due to Cornell University Press soon. In her work, she draws on her background in cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology to ask questions about learning, and about the ways institutions shape and are shaped by cultural patterns. She is trying to move beyond complete relativism to make practical but principled recommendations.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC).