Among the pillars of humanistic education is the idea that learning should shape the whole person by fostering self-actualization, purpose, and perspective-taking. However, traditional grading practices often penalize students for sharing personal meanings, interpretations, and opinions that stray from teachers’ own views or from normative standards. This inhibits intellectual exploration and risks forcing students to parrot expected stances solely to get high marks. While assessing comprehension of objective knowledge is appropriate, grading subjective insights warrants reconsideration. Students should have opportunities to articulate and examine personal implications without fear of consequences to scores. Only by creating space for meaning-making to unfold beyond prescribed answers can education truly enlighten.
Problems With Grading Meaning
Why should interpreting meaning and significance remain ungraded territory? Consider these risks:
- Conflates subjective perspectives with right/wrong facts. Meanings represent inner truths, not external certainties.
- Incentivizes telling teachers what they want to hear, not developing authentic understandings.
- Penalizes those who reach unorthodox yet thoughtful conclusions.
- Assumes teachers have authority over inner experiences only students can access.
- Forces students to filter meaning into acceptable frames to avoid score impacts.
- Stifles exploration of texts, issues, and philosophies for ‘correct’ interpretations.
- Undermines educating the whole person when only some views are valued.
- Contradicts goals of cultivating thinkers who find personal significance.
In essence, grading meaning implies one’s inner life requires external validation - anathema to humanistic education.
Honoring the Sanctity of Inner Experience
Rather than judging whether a student derives the ‘right’ meanings, educators should aim to:
- Welcome all interpretations voiced in good faith as windows into students' thinking.
- Encourage making personal connections without fear of being 'wrong.'
- Facilitate thoughtful exchange of alternate interpretations.
- Guide learners in articulating meanings rather than imposing external analyses.
- Recognize growing ability to interpret experience as success.
- Foster self-awareness around how contexts shape perspectives.
- Only evaluate work and insights on their own terms, not imposed standards.
- Nurture compassion for what ideas, texts, and events illuminate within each student.
When meaning-making remains sacred, creativity and consciousness blossom.
Assessing Rigor and Communication, Not Content
This leaves a question - if subjective insights go ungraded, what should teachers evaluate? Consider focusing on:
- Demonstrating comprehension of source material to support interpretations.
- Making logical connections between evidence and opinions.
- Acknowledging context and biases that shape perspectives.
- Exploring interpretations through multiple analytical lenses.
- Communicating thoughtfully using precise language and concepts.
- Evaluating the rigor of thought processes, not conclusions.
The emphasis falls on analytical and rhetorical skills in conveying perspectives, not the 'correctness' of those perspectives themselves. Students should be empowered to arrive at personal meanings in community with texts and issues.
A Trust-Based Co-Discovery Model
Ideally, meaning-making arises through dialogue, not grading. Educators should:
- Share their own experiences to model meaningful analysis, not final verdicts.
- Ask open questions drawing out students’ interpretations, not leading questions.
- Encourage respectful accountability and growth within a community of individual thinkers.
- Recognize the privilege of supporting students' journeys of discovering purpose.
- Build trust for open exploration of life’s complexity without reductive judgements.
- Champion meaning-making as a cooperative discovery, not competitive achievement.
By nurturing creativity and conscience through meaning-making, education lives up to its highest aims.
Honoring the Meaning Learners Make
To honor the singular inner worlds which education should enrich, grading personal insights warrants conscientious scrutiny. Ensuring students can explore significance without risk of penalty fosters the intellectual freedom at the heart of human development. Of course skills like logic, rigor and communication merit ongoing cultivation. But the unfolding journey of making meaning should remain untethered, revered, and uniquely one’s own.
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