Beyond the Page. Jesse Stommel - Undoing the Grade
The Trent Teaching Commons is pleased to introduce a new event series, Beyond the Page. This conversational series explores recent scholarship in teaching and learning and invites the author to share the motivations and experiences behind their work. We invite you to read their work in advance and join us as we go beyond their written words to learn more about their teaching approaches, successes, and challenges.
Our second speaker is Jesse Stommel, author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade and How to Stop (2023).
Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
Time: 1:00-2:30pm ET
Location: Online via Zoom.
Jesse Stommel, Ph.D. is currently a faculty member in the Writing Program at University of Denver. He is also co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy and Digital Pedagogy Lab. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop and co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy.
Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, digital studies, and composition. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, a clever cat, Loki, and a badass daughter, Hazel. He’s online at jessestommel.com and on Twitter @Jessifer.
Jesse has 12 new publications since 2020, including three pieces in Academe: "Care is a Practice; Care is Pedagogical," "The Human Work of Higher Education Pedagogy," and "Bad Data Are Not Better Than No Data" as well as an edited collection, Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection. He was recently interviewed for stories in New Scientist, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Chemical & Engineering News, and more. In 2019, a feature about him and his work appeared in the print and online versions of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the last two years, he's given over two dozen keynotes, including at The Teaching Professor Conference, at ASU, at the "Against Surveillance Teach-in," and more.
In 2021, he opened PlayForge, a game store with a makerspace and classroom in Old Town Littleton with his husband (and help from then 4-year-old Hazel).