Lessons to Learn from a Lecturer in a Sustainability Communication Course, Undergraduate Strategic Communication Program, Odd Semester 2025–2026
Disclaimer: This essay emerges from the lived experience of grading and prolonged pedagogical dialogue with students, colleagues and myself. It reflects on assessment not as an administrative endpoint, but as an ethical modality through which commitments to knowledge, integrity, and quality education are continuously negotiated.
Introduction
Grading is often perceived as an administrative endpoint of teaching: a procedural act of assigning numbers to texts, guided by rubrics and institutional regulations. Yet, when experienced from within, grading unfolds as a deeply epistemic and ethical practice. During the process of assessing final examinations in a Sustainability Communication course, Odd Semester of 2025–2026, I found myself confronting not only student answers, but the very conditions under which knowledge is claimed, performed, and legitimized. This essay offers a phenomenological reflection on that experience, situating grading as a form of epistemic gatekeeping that directly relates to the promise of Quality Education (SDG 4).
Rather than narrating fatigue alone, this reflection traces how grading became a site of dialogue between theory and practice, between collaboration and authorship, between observation (detached) and execution (engaged), and between educational ideals and their everyday enactment.
Grading as Epistemic Gatekeeping, Not Technical Closure
From the outset, it became clear that grading could not be reduced to technical alignment with a rubric. Fluent language, neat structure, and confident tone did not necessarily signal epistemic adequacy. Some answers appeared “excellent” on the surface, yet lacked references, citations, or traces of dialogue with course readings. This dissonance foregrounded grading as a constitutive communicative practice.
Craig’s constitutive view of communication provides a crucial lens here. Communication theory, he argues, operates as a metadiscursive practice, a discourse about discourse that shapes how communication itself is understood and enacted (Craig, 1999). Grading, in this sense, does not merely evaluate discourse; it actively constitutes what counts as legitimate academic communication within a learning community.
Later, Craig (2015) reminds us that theory is not a static body of knowledge but a practical resource for reflexive engagement. When grading sustainability-related work, the question is not whether students can reproduce sustainability vocabulary, but whether they can position themselves reflexively within contested discourses. Grading thus becomes epistemic gatekeeping: a necessary practice to protect the boundary between reflective knowledge production and hollow performance.
Authorship, Copying, and the Fragility of Academic Integrity
A recurring pattern in the grading process was the submission of near-identical answers within the same group. While collaboration is central to sustainability education, indistinguishable submissions raise epistemic concerns. The issue is not collaboration per se, but the disappearance of authorial voice.
Newig et al. (2013) emphasize that sustainability communication hinges on reflexive and learning-oriented forms of interaction capable of dealing with complexity and ambiguity. Communication processes, they caution, may create the appearance of participation without fostering genuine learning. This insight resonated strongly with what I encountered: collective answers that performed sustainability discourse convincingly, yet lacked differentiated understanding.
In responding to such cases, grading was preceded by pedagogical correspondence. In one email which I anonymized for reflection’s capta, I found myself writing that “the work stopped at the level of task completion rather than ethical and analytical engagement,” noting the absence of “embodied knowledge, knowledge that emerges from presence, affective engagement, and lived interaction.” These words were not punitive; they were diagnostic. They reflected an attempt to preserve academic integrity as an epistemic value, not merely a rule.
Situated Knowing, Field Engagement, and Epistemic Recognition
Not all grading moments were corrective. Some were affirming. In several instances, students engaged directly with communities, conducted field observations, and reflected critically on their positionality. In one correspondence, I explicitly acknowledged that a group had “gone beyond expectations by engaging directly with primary sources and embodied experiences in the field.” Such engagement transformed abstract SDG commitments into contextual, lived understanding.
This distinction matters. Wals and Benavot (2017) argue that sustainability challenges cannot be addressed through technical solutions alone; they require educational practices that foster critical reflection and lifelong learning. Field engagement, in this sense, is not an add-on, but a conditio sine qua non for transformative learning.
Hutchins et al. (2013) further show that knowledge co-production depends on perceived contribution and trust. Grading, therefore, had to recognize situated knowing: students who entered the field, interacted ethically with communities, and reflected on those encounters deserved epistemic recognition distinct from those who remained detached. Differential grading within the same group was not unfairness; it was acknowledgment of unequal epistemic labor.
Grading Fatigue, Reflexivity, and Educational Responsibility
The final theme is affective yet central: fatigue. Prolonged grading generates cognitive and emotional exhaustion, accompanied by a temptation to smooth over differences for the sake of efficiency. Resisting that temptation became an ethical modality (Putranto, 2025).
Here, Ruhet Genç’s (2017) distinction between communication of sustainability and communication for sustainability proved illuminating. Much of the weaker work remained at the level of information transmission—linear, instrumental, and detached. Stronger submissions, by contrast, embraced dialogue, reflexivity, and ethical sensitivity. Grading thus mirrored the very distinction the course sought to teach and impact.
In one exchange with students engaged in sustained fieldwork, I wrote that “terminological accuracy and ethical language matter, as they shape how communities are approached, represented, and respected.” This statement encapsulated a broader realization: grading is not the beginning of judgment, but its culmination shaped by weeks of dialogue, observation, and pedagogical care.
Conclusion and Suggestions
This grading experience reaffirmed that assessment is never neutral. It is an epistemic intervention that shapes what students come to value as knowledge. When aligned with explicit rubrics and reflexive reasoning, grading can support the aims of SDG 4 by safeguarding educational quality without inflating scoring as achievement.
Three lessons stand out. First, grading must function as epistemic gatekeeping, making visible the standards of accountable knowledge. Second, academic integrity should be interpreted as dialogical responsibility rather than mere compliance. Third, differentiated grading is not a failure of pedagogy, but a recognition of situated contribution.
Ultimately, grading is not simply about measuring learning outcomes. It is about giving due attention to student’s personal development (cura personalis) as well as sustaining the conditions under which meaningful learning, namely, critical, ethical, dialogical, and impactful, can continue beyond the classroom, even after the final grade is released.
References
Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1999.tb00355.x
Craig, R. T. (2015). The constitutive metamodel: A 16-year review. Communication Theory, 25(4), 356–374. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12076
Genç, R. (2017). The Importance of Communication in Sustainability & Sustainable Strategies. Procedia Manufacturing, Volume 8, pp. 511-516. ISSN 2351-9789. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.promfg.2017.02.065
Hutchins, K., Lindenfeld, L. A., Bell, K. P., Leahy, J., & Silka, L. (2013). Strengthening Knowledge Co-Production Capacity: Examining Interest in Community-University Partnerships. Sustainability, 5(9), 3744-3770. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5093744
Newig, J., Schulz, D., Fischer, D., Hetze, K., Laws, N., Lüdecke, G., & Rieckmann, M. (2013). Communication Regarding Sustainability: Conceptual Perspectives and Exploration of Societal Subsystems. Sustainability, 5(7), 2976-2990. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5072976
Putranto, H. (2025). [unpublished dissertation] Communication Ethics of Knowledge Production. Repositori FISIP Universitas Indonesia. https://pascakomunikasi.fisip.ui.ac.id/en/category/doctoral-program-3/
Wals, A. E. J., & Benavot, A. (2017). Can we meet the sustainability challenges? The role of education and lifelong learning. European Journal of Education, 52(4), 404–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12250
