
Enhancing Trust and Embracing Vulnerability in the College Classroom: A Reflection on Ungrading and Co-Creation in Teaching and Learning
By Kristina Meinking and Eric Hall
We designed the first iteration of our co-taught course “Beauty and the Brain” throughout the 2017–2018 academic year and brought to that framework an attentiveness to alternative assessment, the close ties between teaching and mentoring, care for student well-being, and an increased awareness of the power of relationships in the classroom. Although our starting points for ungrading and co-creation in teaching and learning (CCTL) differed, it was in the thoughtful engagement with one another and with SoTL literature before the course and the highly reflective and collaborative co-teaching experience that we began to identify for ourselves and one another the values we hold as teachers and the type of classroom environment we seek to create together with our students. We also became increasingly aware of how we needed to model the moves and ways of being that support that classroom environment.
Much happened between fall 2018 and spring 2021, the first and second times we co-taught the course. One of the most significant reflections to emerge from our 2018 iteration of the course was the need for transparency, trust, and vulnerability with one another and especially with students. In the meantime, we had integrated ungrading and CCTL into many or all our individual courses and experimented with different ways of focusing student attention on the significance of the classroom culture and community and of encouraging students to see themselves as critical actors in those spaces. In thinking back on both courses, we see clearly how central trust and vulnerability are to cultivating a dialogic, compassionate, and open classroom environment in which students and teachers alike feel free to take risks, make mistakes, experiment, and share their authentic selves.
Read the TLI article here.