The pandemic of 2020 forced many instructors to reevaluate their teaching and assessment practices. Assignments and assessments designed for face-to-face classes were quickly adapted to go online. Faculty-to-student relationships built through classroom interactions were transformed by the mediation of online platforms. At the time, the co-authors of this article were teaching different psychology courses at different institutions. However, we had similar concerns about the validity of our assessments in an unmonitored online environment and about maintaining personal connections with our students. We used the summer of 2020 to reimagine how our courses could be adapted to this new environment while satisfying specific learning goals, including demonstrating the ability to apply content knowledge and communicating scientific information through writing. To meet these challenges, we implemented a variation on authentic assessments. We replaced our exams with an assignment where students created artifacts of various forms to demonstrate what they had learned and how it connected to their future careers, personal interests, or real-world problems. They also had to include a written description for a non-expert audience to demonstrate their ability to explain their artifacts. This manuscript presents our rationale, requirements, assignments, grading rubrics, student feedback, and reflections on our experiences.

Students are often told that social justice is both the ideal and the reality to which they should be striving, and contributing to, as scholars and as citizens. However, they are often not given the space-and the challenge-to grapple with what social justice means to, and for, them. This paper shares the design of an upper level sociological theory assignment, Socialization as an Investigation of Social Justice Response Papers, that aims to do just that. The course units and theoretical texts are detailed, along with the response paper scaffold assignments, with special emphasis on a structured peer review process aligned with the assignment rubric. Now, having taught the course eight times to date, memorable student contributions to the course, along with an excerpt from the most memorable student response paper, are shared with the aim of inspiring faculty modification, particularly in the Social Sciences.