Formal learning without grades is liberating
A conversation with Youjie (Mina) Chen (Apr 15, 2021)
By John Mitchell and Maxwell Bigman (Decade Ahead Project)
“The way that we are learning in this pandemic is a huge speculative design. We are in a huge global experiment,” says Youjie “Mina” Chen from Ithaca, NY, using a Zoom background that makes her seem to float over the small city and peaceful summer view of Lake Cayuga. After completing her undergraduate degree in industrial engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Youjie took a gap year and worked at a Chinese education technology startup. “Probably, the most valuable lesson we can learn from the pandemic”, she says, “is about how the pandemic is surfacing some of the nature of education. How it is challenging long standing assumptions of education that in normal cases we didn’t dare to question.” What assumptions has it challenged for Mina?
Now a PhD student at Cornell University after completing the Learning, Design and Technology MA program in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, Youjie has published papers on gender differences in academic self-perception, sources of confusion in college classes, and two studies of the Rain Classroom produced by the startup team in China. The Rain Classroom tool was designed to support blended learning and enhance communication between teachers and students. It was used in China’s colleges and universities, with more than 3 million teacher/student users between 2016 and 2018. One study she co-authored evaluated the effectiveness of the tool for 130 participants and found improvements in students’ learning.
Moving from California to upstate New York was tricky during the pandemic. “I had been planning to fly back to China but couldn’t because of the pandemic,” Mina says. Instead she stayed in her California dorm for Winter break. When her program ended, she moved to Ithaca. “Looking for an apartment was okay. The hard part was moving around and buying new things. Meeting new people — that’s the hardest thing.” When meeting new people, “it’s not clear how people are comfortable with their boundaries and distance.” The entire graduate school cohort is new to the program and new to the place,”so we’ve been meeting over Zoom and setting up coworking sessions so we can get to know each other.” Mina reminds us just how challenging it is to get settled at a new educational institution during a pandemic.
With her industry and research background in education technology, we want to know Mina what she has learned from the forced experiment in online learning over the past year. Explaining speculative design, which was a focal point of the Designing Technologies for Social Impact course she assisted at Cornell, Mina says that “speculative design does not aim directly at solving a specific problem.” Instead, speculative design aims to push boundaries, challenge constraints, and create out-of-the-box thinking that might not surface otherwise.
Mina’s first out-of-the-box thinking was about grades: “When it all started, the first thing was that letter grades were made pass/fail. If we think about it — it sounds like in an emergency, the grade is the least important. That’s ironic because for me the grade has always been the essential part of classes.” This caused me to “really question what the value of grades is,” she says.
Another out-of-the-box insight was about learning objectives, which almost every pedagogical expert believes are an essential part of course design and instruction. “Putting learning goals in the syllabus is important. But from a student’s perspective it’s quite standardized. Every student has different learning goals. Without grades I could set more personalized goals.” It gave me the chance to think about “where true value really comes from” in education. “I had a strong feeling of liberation.”
“I had a strong feeling of liberation.”
We ask Mina how the 2020 turmoil around racial justice and anti-Asian sentiment in the US have affected her. “Once I have come to the US … I have become more sensitive about realizing my identity being Asian or being a woman,” she tells us. “Seeing all these conflicts and events has made me wonder why we have all these stereotypes and why we emphasize the differences rather than the similarities.” For Mina the experience has been very impactful: “I’ve learned a lot more during these Asian hate events.” It has also raised important questions, such as “how can we be more open minded about issues and learn to empathize about others’ views?”
Wrapping up, we talk about what we have now learned about online learning that she wishes she had known when working on Rain Classroom in China. “If I were to speak with myself [from] five years ago I would say: you are so innocent. There’s so much more to learn and so many things to look at from a different perspective. Now that I’m in this stage, I feel like the five-years-later me will say the same thing.” This forced global experiment has been challenging and enlightening. Nevertheless, Mina sees the past year with a positive spin: “Life is always more than expected… The biggest lesson is to always keep learning and to be modest and to strive forward.”
