Feedback literacy-as-event: relationality, space and temporality in feedback encounters

Abstract

Research on student and teacher feedback literacies is currently a flourishing sub-field of higher education, as scholars seek to address the durable and dissatisfying dilemmas that feedback processes represent. To date, however, higher education scholarship has been dominated by cognitive and humanist conceptions of feedback literacies, with the focus primarily placed upon how teachers and students might become more feedback literate. Drawing upon the broader fields of academic literacies, and upon relational thinking and sociomaterial theory, we engage the idea of literacy-as-event as a means to understand feedback literacies as unbounded, relational encounters: emergent moments that happen as people and things come together. Our theorisation is elaborated via an exploration of student-staff feedback encounters, where we suggest that a relational approach to feedback literacies provokes new questions for educators: guiding us to look at both what happens and what might be missing from feedback interactions. Given that research helps to construct the ways in which we see the world, and the ways in which we think about concepts of student engagement, we suggest that critical approaches to thinking about literacy practices are essential if we are to understand a diversity of students’ learning experiences, and to support students effectively.