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.
Feedback literacy is not only important to students and teachers but also academics. In particular, academics and researchers who are actively involved as peer reviewers for journals need to develop their capacity, ability, and disposition to provide constructive feedback to authors. In this presentation, I argue that it is especially crucial to develop feedback literacy of peer reviewers because they face more constraints than feedback givers in other contexts (e.g., education). For instance, the identity of the authors is usually unknown to peer reviewers, making it difficult to construct feedback dialogues; other hurdles include the restriction on the mode of feedback, power (im)balance.
Despite the above, not much formal training is available to equip peer reviewers to be feedback literate; the rather mystified scholarly peer-review process, which is usually done individually and “in the dark”, also discourages learning from observation. To demystify the feedback process of scholarly peer review and to share first-hand experiences, this presentation reports a collaborative autoethnographic study on two early-career researchers (ECRs) who are active journal peer reviewers. Since 2017, these two peer reviewers have reviewed for 22 international journals in various disciplines and completed 67 reviews. Recently, they were awarded the Reviewer of the Year Award by Routledge and Higher Education Research & Development, a top-tiered journal in higher education. Informed by conceptual frameworks of feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018; Carless & Winstone, 2020; Chong, 2020) and networked ecological systems theory (Neal & Neal, 2013), personal narratives and reflections of the two peer reviewers will be shared. Implications for supporting less experienced peer reviewers (especially ECRs and doctoral students) to be feedback literate peer reviewers will be discussed.
Assessment and feedback approaches can be influential factors on the students learning and engagement throughout their university experience. However, the assessment and feedback practices used across higher education often represent a more procedural focus to maintain the status quo. There is a continued overwhelming emphasis on summative assessment, which also translates into a dominance in one-way feedback practices across academic disciplines and institutions. Dialogic feedback is making inroads into current practices but is not yet widespread and often forgoes the research suggesting the positive impact it can have on learning, student attainment, engagement and attendance. Higher education’s focus on graduate attributes is proliferating the curriculum, with authentic and integrative assessment being more and more prominent in the course design and implementation. With the increased emphasis on digital skills and the recent Covid-19 global pandemic, this has undoubtably risen up the agenda and will play an even increasing role in the future construction of curriculum, but this research highlights the need for synthesis between these elements. Assessment and feedback practices are often disjointed and limit the possible impact on student attainment and engagement as a result, whilst also being summatively focused and weighted at the end of a module/programme.