Ungrading Art History

The art history classroom has long been distinguished by harsh grading, steep learning curves, and high-stakes memorization. However, in the current era of generative AI and legislative attacks on the humanities, there is an urgent need for art history to reexamine its pedagogical foundations to better fulfill its most vital role: teaching critical thinking about images. Recent pedagogical movements variously called ungrading, contract grading, or de-grading, backed by research in the science of teaching and learning (Alfie Kohn, Susan D. Blum, Joshua R. Eyler, Jesse Stommel, and others) challenge the predominance of punitive strategies for evaluating student learning. Instead, these studies propose approaches that develop students’ intrinsic desires for learning through evaluative feedback, progress-based assessment, self-reflection, project-based learning, and other methods. This panel asks how art history might also reimagine its pedagogical and evaluative practices beyond grades—or conventional assessments more broadly—not only to deepen student engagement, but also to reclaim the radical potential of looking closely at images.

We invite papers that reconsider assessment in art history and architectural history at the university level. We welcome the results of classroom experiments and reflections, including but not limited to the alternative assessment methods mentioned above; new theoretical frameworks for teaching art history; experiments in student-centered approaches; historical perspectives on grading’s role in disciplining art historical knowledge; or collaborative redefinitions of assessment. Together, the panel asks: What is possible when our students approach art history not as a way to make the grade but as a tool to see the world anew?