Dialogical feedback

As the importance of feedback to student learning has become better understood over recent years, two important aspects have emerged. The first is that feedback should be dialogical rather than a one-way form of communication. The second is that feedback works when it is part of a cycle of student learning through receiving feedback and implementing that learning. Taken together, these two ideas lead us to thinking of feedback as representing a dialogic cycle or spiral.

This leads us to the contemporary espoused theory of feedback as an inherently social, dynamic and dialogic activity that involves the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community and societal factors. The implications of feedback as social, dynamic, and dialogic are, however, rarely explored. We are only just beginning to fully explore the fundamental relationships between assessment and social justice. Neither assessment nor learning are neutral or benign practices, and continuing to implicitly or explicitly treat them as such leads to the reproduction of inequalities and symbolic violence, a way of governing difference and constructing difference as Other.

In this space we offer a new way of thinking about feedback that recognizes the reality of symbolic violence, and uses womanist theory to underpin and explain a new approach we call Care-full Feedback.

The need for Care-full Feedback

Care can be thought of as the foundation of human relationships; it facilitates the full expression of sense of self. A care-centered approach to feedback may better enable the complexity, wonderment, relationality, and potential of feedback as a socially-just process that involves the whole person. Thus, in positioning care in feedback interactions, we also encourage readers to sit with the tensions of hope and symbolic violence in education. While we are not offering a prescriptive list of instructions or a simple solution; what we are offering is a provocation to engage deeply with the texts we have embedded within this piece and to reflect upon, discuss, and counter the injustices within education, and specifically within feedback.

Educational researchers have brought attention to the lack of care in academic settings, where care and competence are sometimes positioned as in opposition. As we now recognize that feedback serves an affective purpose and that the feedback process may evoke strong emotions in students, issues of care must come to the fore. Additionally, varied responses to feedback are impacted by perceptions of teachers’ care for their students and their progress. While feedback encounters can be used to establish feelings of trust and express confidence in students, they also have the potential to create feelings of heightened vulnerability, suspicion, and/or misrecognition, as illustrated below:

As Dr. Horton states in her subsequent tweets:

[My PI’s] audacity to put this into my formal record is a textbook example of the ways that institutional racism can quietly, but profoundly impact Black women. I confided in her that I was struggling in one of my classes. What if this review ended my academic career? ….It caused me so much anxiety and insecurity over the years. I tell this story often, as a cautionary tale for faculty and campus leadership about the ways in which anti-Black racism permeates the academy. Also, she spelled my f*cking name wrong!

Students want to be seen by their teachers and for their teachers to express care when providing feedback. This means being sensitive and responsive to the cultural, social, and circumstantial factors that may affect the feedback process. Care-full feedback requires political clarity on the part of the feedback provider—a recognition that there are relationships between academia and society that differently structure what is seen as appropriate or deviant for groups of students through racialized discipline, ethnolinguistic assumptions, and even our attire and hair.

A womanist perspective

The womanist perspective seeks to expose the differences and similarities that human beings experience in the classroom as a result of skin color, language, economic status, and personal experiences. As framed and theorized by Black feminist and womanist scholars such as Audrey Lorde, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins, our vision of care-full feedback is underpinned by ways in which educators may account for racial, socio-economic, gender, cultural, and other differences. We urge readers to use this frame to better understand how assessment and feedback for learning can unwittingly work to reproduce classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities, misrecognitions, and exclusions in ways that appear as fair, objective, and transparent. We propose womanist thought as a praxis that seeks to re-position feedback as a care-full process that embraces the emotional, moral, and political as well as one that leans into accountability, compassion, confidence, courage, joy, and vulnerability.

The womanist educator represents a commitment to the survival and wholeness of entire people and an engagement in the struggle against oppression. The womanist methodology acknowledges the ways in which the polyrhythmic realities of instructors and students help to shape the learning environment—reflecting the belief that individuals do not just have multiple realities and distinct understandings of them; instead, individuals experience intersecting realities simultaneously. Assessment and feedback may be layered with histories and memories, and attention to this humanizes those who are engaging in the feedback process.

Dr. Horton’s jarring academic feedback encounter illustrated above is one of countless examples in which a feedback provider could not reconcile their own narrow view of Black women with how a Black woman presented herself. Black womanist thought offers an anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory foundation for more care-full feedback practices. Womanist educators see systemic injustices as simultaneously social and educational problems. Consequently, they enact a keen awareness of their power and responsibility as adults to contest societal stereotypes, microaggressions, and Othering imposed on marginalized students.

Towards Care-full Feedback

Here we also wish to play with the concept of care-full feedback, realizing that it simultaneously involves taking care, being full of care, and demonstrating care. We invite you to consider how feedback practices might both recognize existing subjectivities but also enable an openness towards new ways of interacting within feedback encounters. Deepened attention to care within the feedback process may allow educators and students to engage more fully in critical and transformative learning. 

We believe a care-full approach to feedback interactions is cognizant of the ways in which white supremacy culture shows up within academic institutions and feedback dialogues; the culture of higher education and the fabricated power of its tradition is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. Care-full feedback also means acknowledging our polyrhythmic realities as educators and feedback providers, understanding that feedback information we may offer is grounded in racial, political, and economical contexts that are unique to us. Care-full feedback aims to create the kinds of conditions under which all students can flourish. A central principle is that of relationality.

Relationality

Teacher-student relationality is found to increase affect and motivation, and to foster trust between students and teachers. By privileging the relational in feedback, we recognize that the attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that students have towards feedback, and in response to feedback, matter in terms of their learning. Relationality can be sustained or can be subverted in how we choose to listen to and respond to students. Relationality also requires treating students as active participants within the feedback spiral and implies sharing control with them and giving them voice. We believe relationality is vital to counter hegemony, symbolic violence, and to better engage in the kind of care-full feedback that supports learning and development.

Relationality also leans into expressions of joy, student progress and flourishing. And relationality takes us back to the original idea of dialogue which is not simply about two or more people in a conversation but also a respectful recognition of the relationality of us all. Again, engaging with the linked works—and discussing with other educators and scholars—may offer a praxis for actualizing some of the considerations here. 

Conclusion

A womanist is a change-maker and a compassionate educator. Womanist educators inform themselves and actively look for bias, especially within themselves, and, having found it, commit to doing something about it. A womanist approach to care-full feedback embraces accountability, political clarity, and equity. A womanist approach to care-full feedback is deployed not just for so-called ‘effective feedback,’ but also for socially just feedback in all its different senses. Social justice theories provide important analytical and reflexive tools to bring to light the exclusionary dimensions of assessment practice in higher education otherwise unseen. The influence of students’ cultural, social, and circumstantial factors as they affect the feedback process remain under-explored; as such, the possibilities of feedback remain, largely, untapped.

As Tricia Hersey asserts, we have a right to reimagine our world. What can care-full feedback look like? What makes care-full feedback possible? What could we imagine as alternatives to our current, dominant assessment technologies and practices? In writing this piece, we aim to call in and call out how the marginalization of and violence against Black students specifically often begins in and is perpetuated through schooling, and namely through the process of feedback. We invite readers to respond by considering how care-full feedback would approach students in a different way. We do not claim there is a silver bullet; instead, our intention is to encourage educators to imagine many ways through which to approach and embed care-full feedback.

That pluralism in itself is subversive. In highlighting a care-full approach to feedback, we hope to engage fellow educators in bold, expansive conversations that invite decolonized and reparative futures within assessment for learning.

Ameena L. Payne, MEd, FHEA, FHERDSA is a strategic PhD scholarship holder at Deakin University’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) . She is a recipient of her alma mater’s Outstanding Young Alumna Award (2022) and is interested in socially just and equitable education, specifically assessment design and feedback. Her website is ameenapayne.com, and she tweets as @AmeenaLPayne.

Jan McArthur, BEc (Hons), PhD, FHEA is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. She is internationally know for her work on assessment for social justice, arguing for fundamental rethinking about both assessment and its social justice implications. You can find more her work on her webpage and on Twitter @JanMcArthur.