I see your concern regarding the practicality of no-grade education. It’s a shame that we’re stuck in mass market education where students themselves are graded items to be organized for corporate uptake.

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Thank you very much for your post. I really appreciated how you pointed out the way we establish relationship with disciplinary institutions such as school and family. There is no doubt such fear limits our autonomy and limits our ability to act they way we desire, if not to think the way we want. Your question brought my mind, the differences between the learning my experiences in public and private schools. While public schools were packed with hundreds of students, trying to survive through the semester, in private school, not only the teachers but also the students have the space to ask questions, for lengthy discussions, and to express themselves. Maybe, partly, it depends on the distribution of resources.

Thank you for sharing a fantastic idea! As I seek new ideas for replacing traditional assessment in my classes now, this resonates with what I have learned about self assessment and removing barriers to learning. This statement speaks to me: ” . . . we tend to achieve more under self-direction.” I see students waiting for instructions in my classes, and this makes me think that I need to create a new paradigm of autonomy for my students. “Pink time” will stop evoking anxiety when students are comfortable leading themselves and their peer groups, so that even if the instructor did not appear, the class could go on!

I’ll take the second part of this first and say that I have a lot of empathy for the bind you find yourself in when you want to give students formative feedback but fear (know) that the specter of the grade makes it unlikely they will even read your comments ….unless they don’t like the grade you’ve assigned. My work around for this in recent years has been to separate these things out — to tell them that I don’t “grade” individual assignments but do respond to the substance of what they’ve done. So I give lots of feedback and encourage dialogue about the work for a given week. This shifts the focus onto the substantive issues at hand and the questions that animated their research process. I do grade exams (2 mts and a final), but we workshop the questions and materials they need for those tests in class before they take the test. In class we work on building an analytical argument from evidence and on the exam I ask them to respond to a question with an analytical argument supported by evidence. I don’t provide many comments on the exams because I invest the comments where I think they do some good — on the steps leading up to the test. Does that make sense?
As for the first part of this (not going to call PETA but will definitely cross my fingers that you don’t think about horse ownership)….of course Pink’s ideas are not new. Alternative models for social organization / politics (education) abounded — especially in Europe in the 19thc., as the contradictions of capitalism became more evident and problematic. But rather than Kropotkin (whom I admire, because rabbits ;-)), or Bakunin (flirting with Nechaev / Nihilism is a step too far) for inspiration about re-imagining education and creativity, I would think about Bogdanov, young Gorky, or Lunacharsky — all of them saw a connection between labor, self-discovery, education, and the creation of a new culture and society. Cool stuff.

I also agree that the requirements for “global and social context, engineering ethics, and lifelong learning” are extremely important in the engineering field. The only ethics I remember in undergrad was in my intro to engineering class where they pretty much just had us read some general ethical standards and maybe we had a short discussion about it (it was a while ago so I don’t really remember). It wasn’t until I took Ethics in Engineering, Science, and Public Policy (CEE 5984) that I really started to see how important ethics is in the engineering field.

I hundred percent agreed with you that “students should be encouraged to enjoy the process of learning itself”. When students themselves enjoy the learning process, they will study for themselves, for their curiosity, their understanding, and NOT for grades.

I completely agree with your post. I think that there definitly needs to be some major changes in the system as a whole in order to really make a difference. Like you said I’m sure most teacher would love to be able to give qualitative feed back but they are already stretched so thin. You used the example of K-12 teachers but I think the same holds true for professors as well, especially in intro classes that can have 200+ students.

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