Pre-Service Teachers’ Lived Experiences with Feedback and its Role in their Professional Becoming

Abstract

This phenomenological study explores how pre-service teachers experience and make meaning of feedback during their teaching practicum, with particular emphasis on its role in shaping their professional identity, instructional confidence, and reflective practice. Grounded in Van Manen’s lifeworld existentials, the research engaged ten pre-service teachers with different disciplines from a state college in Northern Mindanao, Philippines, all of whom were in their final year and actively engaged in supervised classroom instruction. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews and reflective artifacts such as mentor notes and teaching trackers, the study uncovered nine core themes across the dimensions of lived time, space, body, relation, and things. The findings reveal feedback not merely as evaluative input but as a deeply embodied and temporally situated phenomenon—a mirror of readiness, a timeline of growth, and at times a disruptor of pedagogical flow. Feedback was experienced spatially as affirming or constricting, relationally as either validating or diminishing, corporeally as emotionally charged, and materially as embedded in tools and practices that scaffold teacher learning. Feedback in teacher education must be envisioned not merely as evaluative commentary, but as a dialogic and affective exchange that empowers future educators to grow reflectively, strengthen resilience, and embrace holistic professional formation.