Your academic success in this course and throughout your college career depends on your personal health and well-being. Please feel free to talk with me about any difficulty you may be having that may impact your performance in this course as soon as it occurs and before it becomes unmanageable. Please know there are a number of campus support services that stand ready to assist you. I strongly encourage you to contact them when needed.

• Platinum Rule (Upgraded Golden Rule): Give more than you hope to receive. We will all receive exponentially more than we thought possible.

• Be radically supportive: Your peers are your toughest and best teachers. In this class, you will depend upon the eloquence, discernment and imagination of your peers. Give and receive generously. In order to create extraordinary community, let’s be deeply engaged. We’re here to push each other forward and lift each other up. Please close other tabs from your computer, and silence your phone alerts. Take bio breaks as you need.

• Be bold and curious: Allow yourself to evolve and grow. Find an energized balance between ease and effort. Be willing to "try on" new ideas, or ways of doing things that might not be what you prefer or are familiar with. Try to avoid planning what you'll say as you listen to others. Be willing to be surprised, to learn something new. Listen with your whole self.

• Practice Self Focus: Attend to and speak about your own experiences and responses. Do not speak for a whole group or express assumptions about the experience of others. Encourage full participation by all present. Take note of who is speaking and who is not. If you tend to speak often, consider "moving back" and vice versa. Endeavor to speak again only when all others have already spoken.

• Confidentiality, Antiracist Commitment + Zero Tolerance for Abuse: Take home learnings but don't identify anyone other than yourself. If you want to follow up with anyone regarding something they said in class, ask first and respect their wishes. My goal is to make this course not only inclusive and equitable but also explicitly antiracist by standing with Fordham University and the English Department in unequivocally supporting the vital truth of Black Lives Matter and its charge to all of us to recognize biases, confront privilege, and labor toward justice for all Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). During this semester, you can expect that we will discuss complex issues related to racial and other intersectional forms of social justice. The hope is that as we engage these issues, our classroom will become what Lucia Pawlowski calls a “brave space,” in which members courageously and respectfully navigate difficult topics. Our class community is designed to help you spread your wings. It’s not a place to bully anyone else.

📌 Some of these guidelines are adapted from East Bay Meditation Center, Crystal Colombini & The Happy Startup School

Imagine that this wasn’t an official course for credit, but instead that you had seen my advertisement in the newspaper or on the Internet, and were freely coming to my home studio for a class in cooking or yoga. We would have classes, workshops, or lessons, but there would be no official grading of omelets or yoga poses, since letters and numbers would be meaningless in those scenarios. But we all would learn, and perhaps in an encouraging, fun, and creative environment. In considering this course and that home studio scenario, we might ask ourselves three questions: Why are grades meaningless in that home studio setup? How do grades affect learning in classrooms? What social dynamics does the presence of grades create? In both situations, instructors provide students or participants with evaluative feedback from time to time, pointing out where, say, you’ve done well and where I, as the instructor, could suggest improvement. In the home studio situation, many of you would help each other, even rely on each other during and outside of our scheduled meetings. In fact, you’d likely get more feedback from your peers on your work and practices than in a conventional classroom where only the teacher is expected to evaluate and grade.

The latest research in education, writing studies, and psychology have shown overwhelmingly how the presence of grades in classrooms negatively affect the learning and motivation of students. Alfie Kohn (2011), a well known education researcher and teacher of teachers, makes this argument succinctly. To put it another way, if learning is what we are here for, then grades just get in the way since they are the wrong goals to strive for. An “A” doesn’t build a good bridge for an engineer, nor does it help a reporter write a good story, or a urban planner make good decisions for her city. It’s the learning that their grades in school allegedly represent that provides the knowledge to do all that they need to. And so, how do we make sure that our goals aren’t about grades in this class, but about deepening our understanding of the practice of creative writing?

As you might already notice, what I’m arguing for here is a different kind of classroom, and even education. Sir Ken Robinson (2010), a well-known education researcher, makes the argument in a TED talk that typical schooling, with grades and particular standards, is an old and mostly harmful system that we’ve inherited, but now needs to change. One harmful aspect of this old system is that it assumes everyone is the same, that every student develops at the same pace and in the same ways, that variation in skills and literacies in a classroom is bad. It is clear the opposites of these things are more true. For all these reasons, I am incorporating a labor-based grading contract to calculate course grades in our class.

I offer this first draft of a contract that focuses on the responsibilities we’ll assume, not the things to which someone else (usually the teacher) will hold you accountable. The pedagogical shift I’m suggesting is in part a cultural one, one that I would like you to control. Therefore, we will try to approximate the evaluative conditions of a home studio course. That is, we will try to create a culture of support, or rather a community of compassion, a group of people who genuinely care about the wellbeing of each other – and part of that caring, that compassion, is doing things for each other. It turns out, this also helps you learn. The best way to learn is to teach others, to help, to serve. So we will function as collaborators, allies, as fellow-travelers with various skills, abilities, experiences, and talents that we offer the group, rather than adversaries working against each other for grades or a teacher’s approval.

Therefore the default grade for the course is a “B” (3.0). In a nutshell, if you do all that is asked of you in the manner and spirit it is asked, if your work through the processes we establish and the work we assign ourselves in the labor instructions during the semester, if you do all the labor asked of you, then you’ll get a “B” (3.0) course grade. It will not matter what I or your colleagues think of your writing, only that you are listening to our feedback with an open mind and an open heart. If you put in the labor for this class, you are guaranteed a B (3.0) course grade. If you miss class (do not participate fully), turn in assignments late, forget to do assignments, or do not follow the labor instructions precisely, you will get a lower course grade