Students are not alone in needing to develop feedback literacies, but they can feel alone if teaching is something that is done to them by educators. This paper will explore how thinking about connections and relationality leads us towards new ways of thinking about how students and teachers’ experiences can be interconnected, both with one another, and with a wider context. Sharing our own experiences as academics developing feedback literacies can be powerful. Normalising failures, expressing vulnerability, and being open about our continued engagement in learning processes can be transformative for both student and teacher, meaning that teaching and learning become entangled and that teacher and learner become co-learners. During this paper, I will explore theory to discuss how pedagogy can become a matter of relations and lead us towards a ‘pedagogy of response-ability’ (Bozalek et al. 2018) where we can share learning and teaching in new ways. I will also draw upon recent research (Gravett et al. 2019) to disrupt the binary between learning and teacher, and I will explore practical strategies for how we might enact relational pedagogies in the classroom, using storytelling, feedback exemplars and artefacts. Ultimately, I will consider how we can experiment with new ways of thinking about feedback literacies, leading us to new ways of thinking about relationships in learning and teaching.

References
Bozalek, V., Bayat, A., Gachago, D., Motala, S. and Mitchell, V. (2018). ‘A pedagogy of response-ability’. In Bozaelk, V., Braidotti, R., Shefer, T. and Zembylas, M. Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education, pp. 81-97. London: Bloomsbury.

Gravett, K. Kinchin, I. M., Winstone, N. E., Balloo, K., Heron, M., Hosein, A., Lygo-Baker, S. and Medland, E. (2020). The development of academics’ feedback literacy: Experiences of learning from critical feedback via scholarly peer review. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45 (5), 651-665.