Exploring the notion of teacher feedback literacies through the theory of practice architectures

Abstract

Feedback literacy research has largely focussed on learner processes and how teachers can support them. However, a socio-material perspective on feedback as a situated practice foregrounds the interplay between actors, resources, contexts and structures, requiring a repositioning of teachers as entangled with others within practice. This merits further exploration of teacher feedback literacies. We undertake this exploration through the theory of practice architectures, which enables us to interrogate the structures which influence the possibilities for feedback practices and illustrate them in a constructed exemplar. This approach highlights the interrelatedness of teacher and learner practices, and that knowing not only one’s own role, but how practices are co-produced, is part of feedback literacies. Teacher feedback literacies might then be considered as learning to negotiate, align and resist with/in/against the structures which continue to re-make and reproduce ‘old ways’ of doing feedback. This creates a notion of teacher-learner feedback literacies, where teacher feedback literacies are not a separate capability, but entangled and embodied knowing and acting. Efforts to develop feedback literacies must turn to embedded but explicit experiential learning about feedback. Teachers and students should be prepared for possibilities in emergent interactions, rather than following feedback formulae.

Keywords:

• Feedback literacy
• teacher feedback literacy
• feedback
• sociomaterial
• practice

Acknowledgements

We thank Associate Professor Rola Ajjawi for her contributions to the original conception of this paper, and the CRADLE International Symposium 2019: Advancing Research in Student Feedback Literacy for seeding conversations about taking a sociomaterial lens to feedback literacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Joanna Tai is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University. Her interests include student perspectives on learning and assessment from university to the workplace, peer-assisted learning, feedback and assessment literacy, developing capacity for evaluative judgement, and research synthesis.

Margaret Bearman is a Professor (Research) within the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE), Deakin University. Her research interests include assessment design, work-based feedback, simulation and digital technologies, sociomateriality, and educational workforce development.

Karen Gravett is a Lecturer in the Department of Higher Education at the University of Surrey. Her work explores how individuals learn and change within higher education, and her research focuses on understanding student and staff learner identities, the role of academic and assessment literacies in learning, and the conceptualisation of educational transitions.

Liz Molloy is Professor of Work Integrated Learning in the Department of Medical Education, Melbourne Medical School, at the University of Melbourne. She is Academic Director of Interprofessional Education and Practice in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. Her research interests include workplace learning, feedback and assessment, interprofessional education and clinical supervisor professional development.