Enhancing Trust and Embracing Vulnerability in the College Classroom: A Reflection on Ungrading and Co-Creation in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

In this reflective essay, we explore how we and our students experienced trust and opened ourselves up to being vulnerable in two iterations of a course that was built on the pedagogies of ungrading and co-creation in teaching and learning (CCTL). As approaches that fall under the broader umbrella of critical pedagogy, ungrading usually involves an alternative to conventional alphanumeric grading systems, while co-creation in teaching and learning consists of a varied scale of student-and-instructor partnerships in the classroom. The course contexts explored here take ungrading to mean student self-assessment and self-assignment of grades, and our implementation of co-creation focused on significant elements of the course such as expectations, content, assignments, and assessments. We suggest that our combination of these pedagogies exposed the significance of vulnerability to nurturing trust in the college classroom. After an overview of the salient points in the literature on these pedagogies and a discussion of trust and vulnerability, we recollect our own experiences of them in a co-taught second-year honors course. Drawing from our reflections and those expressed in student writing, we observe that we brought a significant level of trust in each other and our students to the course. Further, we note that the processes of sharing authority embedded in both pedagogies significantly deepened that trust while also underscoring, in retrospect, the remarkable degree of vulnerability made accessible to students and instructors alike. Instructors who wish to implement these approaches should be keenly aware of the additional opportunities that trust and vulnerability, as made possible via these pedagogies, offer for building relationships in the classroom and working toward increased inclusivity and equity in the course community.