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As graduate students and faculty who practice contract grading, we were excited to see the recent article by Joyce Olewski Inman and Rebecca A. Powell appear in College Composition and Communication, titled "In the Absence of Grades: Dissonance and Desire in Course-Contract Classrooms."1 We are grateful to the authors for furthering contract grading scholarship by calling attention to the affective resistance to gradeless classrooms experienced by both teachers and students. The article challenges us to acknowledge, voice, and critically interrogate our own socialization as an important (and often overlooked) part of the process of contract creation.
As a group of contract grading practitioners who have taught various composition courses and embody multiple institutional perspectives, we would like to call attention to certain dimensions of Inman and Powell's article that could create some confusion for readers less experienced with grading contracts. We speak as instructors in large public research institutions and two-year institutions who teach diverse student bodies with varying levels of experience writing in dominant academic codes. Some of us identify as white and some identify as colonial subjects. Our shared objec- tives in adopting contract grading include minimizing first-year writings gatekeeping role, building capacity as an equalizer for underprivileged and underrepresented students, and countering deficit narratives that dismiss our students' abilities. While we have come to contract grading from various backgrounds and experiences, we are here responding purposely in polyphony because contract grading scholarship, in its recent revival, has yet to adequately acknowledge and represent the different student and teacher identities that affect its praxis.
In light of these positionalities, we particularly call attention to two unresolved problems with the article:
1. Given the invisibility of the contracts used in the authors' study, we question the generalizability of their conclusions. We argue that all grading contracts are not created equally: contracts have different goals, purposes, consequences, and ideological assumptions. Contract grading is not uniform or monolithic. There is just as much variation as other assessment methods.
2. While understanding affective relationships to grades is an important contribution to the field, we do not see evidence that it "moves the field beyond ideals of socially just assessment and creates a space for decolonizing action" (32). We also question how Inman and Powell define decolonizing and...