In this article, I share an ungraded assignment prompt I designed for a broad survey course on “International Cinema,” the learning outcomes of which included engaging with, assessing, and challenging conventional understandings of film and of cinematic canons. Conceived as a summative assessment meant to encapsulate students’ overall learning at the end of the course, this project asked students to develop either an international film festival featuring ten films or a ten-week international cinema course syllabus. Whether students chose to play the role of a programmer or that of an instructor, they would also submit an essay providing rationale for their work. This assignment aimed to engage students in challenging traditional film canons by (1) creating a public-facing document that incorporated their cinephilia and prescribed a particular conception of international cinema, (2) articulating their personal taste, and (3) reflecting on and evaluating successes and shortcomings of the final project.[1] However, measuring student success against my own projected notions of scope, depth, and demonstrations of learning seemed unfair due to how much the project relied on students’ knowledge coming into the course and their varying degrees of access to resources. In recognition of these limitations and of the experimental nature of the project, I adopted ungrading to encourage creativity and critical thinking on the part of students. Rather than take their different starting points as gaps or deficits in historical knowledge, I guided students to evaluate their pre-existing knowledge as frames of reference from which to initiate their curatorial work. Beyond disrupting traditional modes of assessment, ungrading here also served to lead students in process-oriented practices of peer- and self-assessment as models for critiquing canonical film histories.

I. The Course

To serve a unique mix of undergraduate and graduate students at Boston University, the course needed to accommodate their varying levels of exposure to and interest in international cinema. It thus leaned toward historiography as much as film history itself, as I formulated lessons that asked students to consider how history is told and why it is told in such a manner (i.e., linearly), and from such a perspective (i.e., Western). With such a broad student population in mind, these questions were framed by the rather elusive concept of the film canon: what is it, what are its values, what silences does it (re)produce, and how do we cope with and challenge it?[2]

At the heart of such questions lay a pedagogical concern with critical thinking, as I hoped students would seriously consider both the canonical history presented in the course and different ways to challenge, reframe, or expand upon it collectively and individually. According to bell hooks, whose writings on pedagogy echo her well-known contributions to intersectional feminism, critical thinking is “a way of approaching ideas that aims to understand core, underlying truths, not simply that superficial truth that may be most obviously visible.”[3] She further suggests that this can only be achieved when instructors demonstrate thinking as action. Thus, I have implemented noncanonical elements to the course as a way to model challenges to and expansions of the so-called film canon.

It follows that students, too, help produce canonical knowledge; as such, they can also help disrupt it. In this case, recognizing and taking advantage of a diverse group of students—from different backgrounds, levels of experience, cinephilia, and so on—was imperative in the establishment of a learning community. If students could recognize that their points of contact with cinema—however fleeting or robust—already constituted a personal canon worthy of articulation, critique, and dissemination, they could begin to shape their contributions to the course in a thoughtful and deliberate manner.

We began with personal questions about what students were curious about, and what drove them towards particular films or filmographies across the world. We considered the sociohistorical conditions that had informed their film practices and quickly turned to questions of historical narrative and history production, and the formation and function of canons. Employing scholars’ considerations of the uses and challenges of film canons as models, students encountered debates within the field about silences that are reproduced in the production of history while learning strategies for how to address them.[4]

I also applied these questions to the course itself, demonstrating that it should be taken by students as being always in flux, open to being remodeled and designed differently, to adopting different foci, and to addressing specific issues (such as nationality, Orientalism, race, gender, etc.). This framework invited students to consider its plasticity not as a shortcoming, but as a learning opportunity activated by their individual curiosity and exploration.

II. The Project

I developed the assignment with the aim to further make use of the diversity of background knowledge and experience my students brought into the classroom. One of my goals was to encourage students to recognize their prior knowledge not as insufficient, but as a product of their specific frames of reference and access to resources. Whether students chose to design a repertory film festival or a ten-week “International Cinema” course, they would be showcasing their interests in film history as important contributions to our learning environment, the field, and beyond. Presuming an alignment with their future career goals, I encouraged undergraduate students (most majoring in film production) to choose the programming option and graduate students to choose the syllabus. In addition to the mock-up festival brochure or the mock-up course syllabus, students also submitted a project rationale in which they reflected on their process, intended goals, methodology and framework, and the limitations of the outcome.

The purposely broad scope of the assignment posed new challenges for assessment beyond the structural inequalities generally identified as the major drawback of traditional grading.[5] For one, the more creative and daring a student’s project would be, the more it would (hopefully) push up against the limits of my own frames of reference. Second, it would be virtually impossible to truly measure student growth and gains in the course from this project alone without knowing their starting point, which already varied widely according to each student’s level of familiarity with their chosen topic or framework. Third, unable to discern the interests and gaps in their approach to film history, I alone could not assess the potential impact and effectiveness of a student’s project on their intended audience, which may or may not consist of other film students or scholars like me. A collaborative and self-reflective approach to assessment seemed to ease the tension created by these grading challenges. Thus, to recenter student learning and widen its potential creative range, I split the project into three phases: execution (which culminated in the public-facing brochure or syllabus alongside the project rationale essay), peer review, and self-assessment and grading.

III. Considerations for Ungrading

Ultimately, ungrading here sought to kindle students’ critical reflection of their work as a gateway to challenging dominant modes of knowledge production in the field of media studies. Mirroring materials covered throughout the course that addressed historical production and canon formation, this self-assessment invited students to reflect on their biases and access to information, to identify and articulate their intervention into the canon, and to evaluate the gaps and silences produced by their work. As such, in addition to facilitating collaboration among students and guiding the evaluation of their own projects, this ungraded project encouraged critical and creative thinking about their work, the course, and the field more broadly.

Thus, to be effective, efforts toward ungrading needed to replicate both the constructive and the disruptive impulses of the assigned project and the course. To mirror and counterpoint the centrifugal aim of the project—articulated in the public-facing interventions of the film canon that drew on students’ experience while simultaneously challenging taste-making conventions—I needed to add a centripetal movement, rehearsed in peer- and self-evaluation that invited them to revisit their own work through specific frameworks of assessment. I saw this step as crucial for nurturing students as autonomous, collaborative, and generative critical thinkers.

IV. Peer Feedback and Self-Grading

Having practiced critical thinking throughout the course, students were expected to put these skills into practice when considering each other’s work. For the second phase of the project, they shared a close-to-final draft of their project with a small group of their peers to discuss in detail. The third and final phase consisted of submitting a self-evaluation report to me at the end of the class, in which students were required to indicate the grade they believed they had earned in the project. Guiding questions helped students establish their own criteria for evaluating their projects while also considering peer feedback received in person.[6] Insofar as the project was aspirational, the self-evaluation report enabled students to reflect once more on a blend of their own interests and what they believed to be in the best interest of their projected audience.

Based on the data I collected from student surveys, the most positive outcome of my ungrading approach was that students expressed feeling encouraged to take more risks with their projects and finding value in formally evaluating their own work. Other responses were more mixed: students reported feeling neither more nor less committed to the project due to its ungraded nature, and they were split on whether they believed knowing they would be evaluating their own work affected how much time they dedicated to completing it. Although the sample size amounted to only a quarter of the students in the class (5 out of 20), anecdotal evidence collected in informal conversations I have carried out with students confirms the statistical leanings gathered in the survey. While these numbers show students’ ambivalence toward ungrading practices, the overall sentiment was one of satisfaction with the end results of the projects they produced.

As this current issue of Teaching Media demonstrates, there are, of course, many sound reasons to adopt ungrading practices. In this case, given the course’s aim of disrupting disciplinary canons and its calls for more inclusivity in the field, the many drawbacks of grading would only hamper my efforts to guide students’ critical engagement with the proposed materials and their own viewing practices. Echoing Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” in her description of “engaged pedagogy,” bell hooks argues that “any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process.”[7] With this dual goal of critical engagement and collective growth, I propose not that ungrading become a one-size-fits-all replacement model, but, rather, that courses offer opportunities for students to reflect on their work and evaluate their performance. Modeled appropriately and treated with the seriousness it deserves, this process can aid students in developing skills that will no doubt be of high importance in most if not all careers they follow beyond the course. Seen in such a light, ungrading offers the potential to transform the classroom in the direction of a more equitable and democratic environment whose rewards can be recognized not as a finite product, but as an always ongoing, collaborative process.

Bruno Guaraná is Master Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Boston University’s College of Communication. Originally from Recife, Brazil, he earned his PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and his MA in Film from Columbia University. His current work explores negotiations of cultural citizenship in contemporary Brazilian media through an intersectional approach. He is a contributing editor for Film Quarterly.

1. . “Cinephilia” might be a presumptuous term to adopt here. Surely, some of my students may not consider themselves cinephiles in the strict sense. However, as a pedagogical strategy, I employ the concept more expansively to invite students to carefully take account of their own relationships with cinema, and of how they practice that relationship. However incipient or consummate their experiences with cinema might be, these are cinephiles-in-potential and should consider their background knowledge as a worthy starting point in their exploration of film history more broadly. ↑

2. . I had inherited the course from Lindsey Decker, whose framing of it in terms of film canons provided me with a useful starting point. I thank her for generously sharing her materials with me. ↑

3. . bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), p. 9. ↑

4. . See, for example, Janet Staiger, “The Politics of Film Canons,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 3 (1985): 4; Annette Kuhn, “The Production of Meaning and the Meaning of Production,” in Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1994), 178–96; Robert Ray, “Cinephilia as a Method,” in For the Love of Cinema, ed. Rashna Richards and David Johnson (Indiana University Press, 2017), 27–49; Ana López, “The Melodrama in Latin America: Films, Telenovelas, and the Currency of a Popular Form,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 596–606. ↑

5. . See Jesse Stommel, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop (Washington, D.C.: Hybrid Pedagogy, 2023). ↑

6. . On self-grading, two points that have become salient to me demand further consideration. First, my experience indicates that students are more likely to deflate than to inflate their grade. Hoping to curb this, I clearly communicate to them that I make a commitment to honor their suggested grade unless it is glaringly inaccurate. Second, either because it makes them uncomfortable due to their unfamiliarity with this level of control, or because they cannot fully trust my commitment to honoring their suggested grades, many students expressly find the process of assigning their own grade to be filled with anxiety. To this point, I have found no solution beyond trying to comfort them in the process and asking students to assign themselves not a final grade for the course, but only a grade for that particular project, hopefully mitigating some of that pressure. ↑

7. . bell hooks, “Engaged Pedagogy” in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 21. See also Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Ira Shor, 50th Anniversary Edition (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). ↑