Let’s Agree to Agree: Community Agreements for Equitable Learning Environments

Unconference: Jessica Walker (Parsons School of Design) and Jeongki Lim (Parsons School of Design)

Abstract

We are faculty from the School of Design Strategies at Parsons with backgrounds ranging across creative arts, entrepreneurship, leadership, and social practice. Through our teaching, creative practices, research, and academic leadership roles, we are exploring emergent systems that promote equitable learning spaces, with a particular focus on those enabled in online collaborative environments. Our recent scholarship within the field of learning engineering focuses on participatory evaluation and community agreements as the building blocks for establishing classroom assessment strategies. We are guided by research that indicates that relying solely on standardized grading practices has been proven to widen the achievement gap among learners from under-resourced backgrounds. By centering collaborative peer-informed assessment, we are exploring opportunities that aim to dissuade teacher bias, which has been documented to impact low income and students of color at disproportionate rates. In what ways might we center inclusion and personal reflection by calling students into the setting of ground rules and giving them more decision-making power in how they are assessed? We see a promising research domain where the objective is to develop a selforganizing assessment practice built on the establishment of community agreements. We are in the early stages of developing Allgrade, an experimental online collaboration tool that challenges the dominant topdown approach to classroom assessment. Our model will center participatory assessment practices such as community agreements and peer-review, as potential ways to consider how frameworks of inclusion promote resilience, self-efficacy, and belonging among all stakeholders within the learning environment.