In Grading Justice: Teacher-Activist Approaches to Assessment, new and seasoned teachers are invited to engage with socially-just approaches of assessment, including practices aimed at resisting and undoing grading and assessment altogether, to create more democratic grading practices and policies, foregrounding the transformative potential of communication within their courses. The contributions in this collection encourage readers to consider not only how educators might assess social justice work in and beyond the classroom, but also to imagine what a social justice approach to grading and assessment would mean for intervening into unjust modes of teaching and learning. Educators wishing to explore critical modes of grading and assessment, grounded in social justice, will find this book a timely and relevant pedagogical guide for their teaching and scholarship.

"Joe Feldman shows us how we can use grading to help students become the leaders of their own learning and lift the veil on how to succeed. . . . This must-have book will help teachers learn to implement improved, equity-focused grading for impact." —Zaretta Hammond, Author of Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain Crack open the grading conversation Here at last—and none too soon—is a resource that delivers the research base, tools, and courage to tackle one of the most challenging and emotionally charged conversations in today’s schools: our inconsistent grading practices and the ways they can inadvertently perpetuate the achievement and opportunity gaps among our students. With Grading for Equity, Joe Feldman cuts to the core of the conversation, revealing how grading practices that are accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational will improve learning, minimize grade inflation, reduce failure rates, and become a lever for creating stronger teacher-student relationships and more caring classrooms. Essential reading for schoolwide and individual book study or for student advocates, Grading for Equity provides A critical historical backdrop, describing how our inherited system of grading was originally set up as a sorting mechanism to provide or deny opportunity, control students, and endorse a "fixed mindset" about students’ academic potential—practices that are still in place a century later A summary of the research on motivation and equitable teaching and learning, establishing a rock-solid foundation and a "true north" orientation toward equitable grading practices Specific grading practices that are more equitable, along with teacher examples, strategies to solve common hiccups and concerns, and evidence of effectiveness Reflection tools for facilitating individual or group engagement and understanding As Joe writes, "Grading practices are a mirror not just for students, but for us as their teachers." Each one of us should start by asking, "What do my grading practices say about who I am and what I believe?" Then, let’s make the choice to do things differently . . . with Grading for Equity as a dog-eared reference.

Drawing on social justice methodologies and cultural studies scholarship, Key Theoretical Frameworks for Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century offers new curricular and pedagogical approaches to teaching technical communication. Including original essays by emerging and established scholars, the volume educates students, teachers, and practitioners on identifying and assessing issues of social justice and globalization. The collection provides a valuable resource for teachers new to translating social justice theories to the classroom by presenting concrete examples related to technical communication. Each contribution adopts a particular theoretical approach, explains the theory, situates it within disciplinary scholarship, contextualizes the approach from the author’s experience, and offers additional teaching applications. The first volume of its kind, Key Theoretical Frameworks for Teaching Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century links the theoretical with the pedagogical in order to articulate, use, and assess social justice frameworks for designing and teaching courses in technical communication. Contributors: Godwin Y. Agboka, Matthew Cox, Marcos Del Hierro, Jessica Edwards, Erin A. Frost, Elise Verzosa Hurley, Natasha N. Jones, Cruz Medina, Marie E. Moeller, Kristen R. Moore, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Gerald Savage, J. Blake Scott, Barbi Smyser-Fauble, Kenneth Walker, Rebecca Walton

Asao B. Inoue argues for the use of labor-based grading contracts along with compassionate practices to determine course grades as a way to do social justice work with students.

A Little Piece Of Ground will help young readers understand more about one of the worst conflicts afflicting our world today. Written by Elizabeth Laird, one of Great Britain’s best-known young adult authors, A Little Piece Of Ground explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy. Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli military subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, trapped at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play football with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that’s the perfect site for a football pitch. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city there’s constant danger, even for schoolboys. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive. This powerful book fills a substantial gap in existing young adult literature on the Middle East. With 23,000 copies already sold in the United Kingdom and Canada, this book is sure to find a wide audience among young adult readers in the United States.

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K-12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative. CONTRIBUTORS: Aaron Blackwelder Susan D. Blum Arthur Chiaravalli Gary Chu Cathy N. Davidson Laura Gibbs Christina Katopodis Joy Kirr Alfie Kohn Christopher Riesbeck Starr Sackstein Marcus Schultz-Bergin Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh Jesse Stommel John Warner

Anti-bias education begins with you! Become a skilled anti-bias teacher with this practical guidance to confronting and eliminating barriers.

"This book culminates a career-long search for justice. I felt it important to understand what it is and where it came from as a feature of human society, of human life. I wound up in a department of education, perhaps quite fortuitously, for education enabled me to examine how experiences of justice or injustice in various educational settings shape children and young people's values, behaviors, and chances for living a decent future life"--

This book is a ... for thoughtful legislators and all the rest of us who seek justice for persons charged with crimes-proportional punishment of the guilty, and exculpation of the morally blameless. The authors demonstrate, with remarkable lucidity, how and why the criminal law sometimes deliberately sacrifices justice for other goals, and they provide thoughtful, controversial, and often persuasive suggestions on how we can redesign our legal system to give people their just deserts. [In the book, the authors offer an] account of how the American criminal justice system fails to give offenders their just deserts in a number of different contexts. From the refusal to allow partial exoneration for defenses like mistake of law and insanity to the practical limitations on detecting and prosecuting offenders, [they also] demonstrate through ... discussions of actual cases the many areas where criminal sentencing fails to do justice. -Dust jacket.

Most murderers and rapists escape justice, a horrifying fact that has gone largely unexamined until now. This groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Each chapter outlines the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, describing the interests at stake, and providing real-world examples. Finally, each chapter reviews proposed and implemented reforms that could balance the competing interests in a less justice-frustrating manner and recommends one—sometimes completely original—reform to improve the system. A systematic study of justice failures is long overdue. As this book discusses, regular failures of justice in serious criminal cases undermine deterrence and the criminal justice system’s credibility with the community as a moral authority. The damage caused by unpunished crime is immense and, even worse, falls primarily on vulnerable minority communities. Now for the first time, students, researchers, policymakers, and citizens have a resource that explains why justice failures occur and what can be done about them. Confronting Failures of Justice is accessible for use by college freshman through graduate students and law students and is designed to be main text for a course on justice failures, but it could be used in conjunction with other texts in a broad range of courses touching on criminal justice. It presents arguments in a highly-organized fashion and provides dozens of case studies, many with photographs, to gain student interest and to bring the academic discussions to life.