Reimagining the Feedback Relation: Humanizing Student-Teacher and Research Participant–Researcher Feedback Cycles

• In Event: Examining Intergenerational Cultures of Collaboration, Resistance, and Social Dreaming in Multimedia Learning Environments

Abstract

Research on written feedback has explored best practices in scaffolding students as they improve their writing. At the same time this research has often decontextualized those feedback moves from the socioemotional, sociocultural, and sociopolitical aspects of student’s development and how that development unfolds within networks of social relations. Using participatory design and ethnographic methodologies (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Erickson, 2006) we explore the student writing and instructor feedback that occurred within a summer pre-enrollment program designed for first-generation, low-income students and students of color.

We closely analyze three student cases as contextualized in a broader set of 40 student portfolios. Each of our cases identify particular aspects of feedback that were attuned to the political, emotional, ethical and the relational dimensions of writing and revision (Ballenger & Myers, 2019). We explore how feedback on student’s work is actually a layered site of relationship building, sustenance and restoration across multiple levels, including the relationships between instructor and learner, the relationships between students and familial/peer networks, and the relationships between researchers and study participants as co-authors of the meanings shared in literacy research.

We contextualize these relationships in the context of a program that positioned all participants—students, undergraduate mentors, graduate TA’s, faculty—as writers engaged in conversations around the complexities and possibilities of writing together. We explore how establishing new feedback cycles and relations is instrumental in disrupting the forms of epistemic singularity and enclosure of intellectual and creative possibility endemic to normative, Western models of literacy instruction (Warren et al., 2020). Our close analysis of data sets for each case (comprised of student writing, instructor feedback and in-depth interviews) revealed specific feedback moves that encourage epistemic heterogeneity, writerly experimentation and agency, and co-thinking across teachers and learning in and through the feedback.

We also found that students described new relationships with the act of writing as tied to repairing or deepening relationships with family members and cultural practices, relationships that are often disfigured through colonial and assimilationist systems. Alongside the pedagogical implications woven throughout, we theorize written feedback on student writing as a relation (Simon, 2013) that can mediate other relationships in ways that support everyday enactments of social transformation, what we conceptualize as political-ethical becoming.

Authors

• Kalonji L. Nzinga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Allena G. Berry, University School of Nashville