Students' Talk about the Climate of Feedback Interventions in the Critique

Abstract

Similar to many courses in communication, oral communication is central to the learning goals in the discipline of design. Design critiques, the primary communication activity in design classrooms, occur in every studio course multiple times. One key feature of the critique, as an oral genre, is the amount of time and emphasis placed on feedback. The feedback intervention process within the critique plays a large role in determining the overall communicative climate of the teaching and learning event. The purpose of this study was to explore how students talk about the communication climate of the critique and the feedback within it. Drawing on feedback intervention theory and using an ethnographic interviewing framework, we conducted in-depth interviews of students in design studios. Results of this study identified four ways students characterized the critique climate and six kinds of feedback students suggested contribute to a climate for learning. Discussion suggests that feedback intervention spaces (specifically those focused on oral genres) are dialectical and relational spaces—necessitating attention not only to the cognitive processes of feedback (as feedback intervention theory suggests), but also to the emergent relational tensions that demand communicative energy within the feedback intervention process.

Keywords:

• Feedback Intervention Theory
• Design Critiques
• Classroom Climate
• Dialectics
• Communication across the Curriculum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the administrators, faculty and students in the College of Design at North Carolina State University who opened their studios and allowed us to work with them in this endeavor.

Notes

1. Of note, we use the language "positive" and "negative" here based on students' usage of them in their ordinary language and do not refer to any theoretical claims that might also use such terms (e.g., systems theory).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deanna P. Dannels

Deanna P. Dannels (Ph.D., University of Utah, 1999) is an Associate Professor and the Director of GTA Development in the Department of Communication, and the Associate Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University

Amy L. Housley Gaffney

Amy L. Housley Gaffney (Ph.D., North Carolina State University, 2010) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky

Kelly Norris Martin

Kelly Norris Martin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media Program at North Carolina State University