What Fails, Teaches: Ungrading, Accountability Culture, and the Risks of Black Feminist Pedagogy

In this critical autoethnography, I examine how ungrading opens and constrains Black feminist pedagogy within a classroom organized by accountability policy. Using journal entries, student feedback, and institutional documents, I analyze how surveillance and accountability logics rooted in federal education policy organize relationships and assessment practices. Findings illustrate that removing grades rendered narrative care illegible as intellectual care and evaluation, so the absence of quantification signaled the absence of care. Shaped by years of measurement, students interpreted intellectual care and personal standing through metrics, while institutional reporting demanded the same proof, creating a surveillance loop that directed my labor toward documentation. This double bind concentrated risk on a contingent (ie, non-tenure track) Blackwoman instructor, while evaluation systems penalized the very teaching practices that institutions claimed to value. This analysis extends Black feminist pedagogy and accountability scholarship by theorizing policy socialization as a classroom force and reframing student resistance as structural literacy.