Alternative Assessment Ecologies

Series: Disability and Alternative Assessment Practices in Composition Classrooms
Article 2: Methods
By Grace Walraven

Welcome back to article two of the Disability and Alternative Assessment Practices in Composition Classrooms series! In this article, I discuss several alternative assessment practices, including ungrading, labor-based contract grading, and engagement-based contract grading. Cripistemologies, crip time, and radical flexibility are also given space for discussion and general definition.

Cripistemologies, Crip Time, and Radical Flexibility

Cripistemology

Cripistemology can be best conceptualized within a larger tradition that emphasizes disabled voices and experiences in the production of first-person knowledge about topics that concern disabled people and communities. Hawkins contrasts this tradition with higher education’s history of positioning disabled people as objects of study rather than recognizing disability as a source of critical knowledge production. Cripistemological frameworks, she argues, “enable disabled individuals to know and work from their preexisting ways of being and knowing” (Hawkins 10).

In academia, a cripistemological approach allows for knowledge generation that is more diverse and robust than current “normative” epistemological approaches. Bringing cripistemology into the composition classroom allows students to approach the writing process in ways they know work for them, giving them more agency in how they engage with the composition curriculum.

Crip Time and Radical Flexibility

Crip time and radical flexibility go hand in hand. Crip time deconstructs the “normative” expectations surrounding the time and labor required to complete something. Neurodiverse and disabled students may negotiate the time and labor required to complete a course or assignment differently from neurotypical, nondisabled students.

Crip time “refers to a flexible approach to normative time frames” (qtd. in Wood 264). Wood later explains that “it’s not just about more time; it’s about flexibly managing, negotiating and experiencing time” (278).

Wood also argues that pedagogical designs should be negotiated with disabled students rather than simply created for them (278). Giving the students most affected agency over how they negotiate time and labor is significant in creating an assessment ecology that works for each individual student.

Ungrading

Ungrading is an interesting concept, one I had never heard of before the start of the Summer 2026 term. Austin Bailey and Caroline Wilkinson explain that ungrading attends directly to the affective dimensions of assessment. It asks instructors to consider students’ “goals, desires, and needs” while suspending familiar habits of disembodied judgment (8–9).

Bailey and Wilkinson move toward what they call qualitative learning, which considers “the dynamic—and ultimately unquantifiable—experience of learning itself” (9). Ungrading can function both as an umbrella term encompassing many forms of alternative assessment ecologies and as an assessment ecology in itself, as Bailey and Wilkinson use it.

Narrative-Based Ungrading

Bailey and Wilkinson describe their assessment ecology broadly as ungrading but, more specifically, as a narrative-based approach. This approach asks students to “conceptualize themselves as individual learners” and signals that they are trusted to take control of their own learning process and progress (10). It places assessment within a “radically holistic, ungraded classroom culture and process” (10).

I found Bailey and Wilkinson’s ungrading practice particularly relevant for neurodiverse and disabled students because it assesses learning holistically, valuing the negotiations of time and labor that students engage in as part of the assessment ecology. Although this narrative-based approach does not specifically address disability, it recognizes that students do not exist in a vacuum where one course is their only responsibility or priority.

Engagement-Based Contract Grading

A notable approach is engagement-based contract grading, which has developed as a cripistemological response to labor-based contract grading. In The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading, Ellen C. Carillo presents engagement-based contract grading as an alternative to labor-based contract grading.

Carillo argues that replacing labor with engagement and introducing crip time can decouple willingness from ability because “a student’s chosen form of engagement is not bound to normative conceptions of time” (61). This decoupling gives students more agency not only in how they engage with a course but also in how they are assessed.

The Curriculum Question

A question I had about ungrading and engagement-based approaches was: How does the instructor balance the requirements of a curriculum with the needs of students?

I found that I needed to broaden what I defined as composition and recognize the different ways people compose and write in their daily lives. Taking a more holistic approach to course engagement does not detract from the composition curriculum; it creates a more diverse and robust definition of being a writer.

Forms of Engagement

Carillo lists discussion-board posts, oral participation in discussions, simulations, collaborative note-taking, and a choice between alphabetic and multimodal responses to assignments as possible forms of engagement in a composition classroom (57).

Engagement and knowledge generation can happen through many different forms. By allowing students agency in their choice of engagement and offering radical flexibility, we can learn more than “normative” standards would allow (Carillo 57–61; Wood 278).

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