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.

Keywords:

• academic literacy
• feedback literacy
• literacy-as-event
• relational thinking

Introduction: feedback literacies - a changing field

Feedback literacy research has recently become significant as a burgeoning area of educational theory and practice, focused on supporting ways to maximise the value and utility of effective feedback for learning (Carless and Boud 2018; Molloy, Boud, and Henderson 2019; Chong 2021). Increasingly, researchers have argued for a need to move beyond teacher-centred, delivery models of transmitting feedback information towards learning-focused approaches emphasising students seeking and acting on feedback inputs of different forms (Carless and Boud 2018; Winstone and Carless 2019). A key part of this approach involves the notion of creating opportunities within the curriculum for students to enhance feedback literacy by eliciting, processing and enacting feedback (Malecka, Boud, and Carless 2022). In these initial shifts to focus attention beyond the teacher, the lens nevertheless remains upon the human actors and their assumed agency within the learning environment. Neither transmission nor learning-focused approaches have offered detailed, explicit consideration of the nonhuman actors that might play an agentic role in literacy practices, or of the scope for multiple potentialities for meaning-making within the feedback interaction. Such approaches risk missing opportunities to foreground the complex, relational quality of learning interactions − how teachers, learners and things entangle as part of a wider web of relations − or worse, perpetuating a ‘skills fetish’ (Wheelahan and Doughney 2022), where narrow conceptions of literacy development are underpinned by individualism.

Within higher education, thinking has traditionally been dominated by cognitive psychology, with a focus on individual students as separate from raced, classed and gendered learning contexts (Haggis 2009; Manathunga 2011; Gravett 2022). This focus upon the agential capabilities of individuals is exacerbated by the understandable desire within the sector to achieve generalisable, measurable practices, removed from the particularities of localised learning environments. However, as Brookfield explains, teaching is inevitably situated, with teachers doing ‘their best to muddle through the complex contexts and configurations that our classrooms represent’ (2015, 1). In the main, feedback literacy research leans towards cognitive, psychological and humanist conceptions that limit the focus upon what individuals do to make meaning (Gravett 2022; Nieminen and Carless 2022). Given that research methods work to construct realities, including how students are understood, it is important that researchers seek out alternative approaches to understanding student engagement with feedback in higher education.

At the same time, elsewhere in the social sciences, interest in the role of materiality in learning (Barad 2007; Sørensen 2009; Bennett 2010; Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021) is provoking new questions regarding how we might understand relationality. In this study, we build upon insights from research into feedback practices that is beginning to call upon educators to think differently about feedback literacies. We are interested in the ways in which feedback is influenced by social, material and cultural contexts (Ajjawi et al. 2017; Chong 2021; O’Donovan et al. 2021), as well as the ways in which feedback literacies have been articulated as contested and situated practices (Tai et al. 2021; Gravett 2022). We are concerned with how we can problematise simplistic conceptions of student agency (Nieminen et al. 2022), and respond to the call for linkages between feedback literacy and other strands of literacy research (Gravett 2022; Nieminen and Carless 2022).

This article also speaks to research that is beginning to foreground the role of relational pedagogies (Bovill 2020; Felten and Lambert 2020; Gravett 2023). In this literature, relational connections are positioned as fundamental to effective learning and teaching. The role of care, respect and a sense of mattering, or belonging, is prioritised. Relational pedagogies have also been examined specifically with respect to feedback practices, with feedback understood as part of an ongoing socially-embedded process that emerges through feedback encounters (Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Esterhazy 2018). Given that engaging with feedback is often a profoundly affective and emotive experience (e.g. Shields 2015; Ajjawi, Olson, and McNaughton 2022), an approach to understanding feedback interactions that considers the role of human connections is important if we are to understand how and why students engage on some occasions but not on others. Recent work, however, has expanded conceptions of relationality to include the materiality of relational feedback encounters. This approach broadens the gaze to look beyond the people involved, considering the agency of material objects and the role of time and space within unfolding feedback situations (Tai et al. 2021; Winstone et al. 2021; Gravett 2022). Feedback literacies are less attributes to be possessed, and more something that is continually re-developed and re-enacted as we respond to different situations (Tai et al. 2021).

Together, these thought-provoking ideas lead us beyond bounded conceptions of the literate individual. In this article, we therefore respond to calls (Tai et al. 2021; Gravett 2022; Nieminen and Carless 2022) to redirect the conversation surrounding feedback literacies by addressing the following questions: who and what matters within feedback literacy practices? How can we attune to the emergent moments of feedback encounters? And how can we enhance our understanding of literacies as unfolding, relational processes of meaning making? Specifically, we engage the idea of literacy-as-event (Burnett and Merchant 2020a, 2020b) in order to explore what it can offer us as a means to conceptualise feedback interactions as relational, emergent and unbounded: as ‘an ongoing reassembling of the human and the more-than-human’ (Burnett and Merchant 2020a, 52). These ideas interweave with the sensibilities of sociomaterial theory (for example, Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011; Gourlay 2017), as well as drawing insights from the literature on academic literacies and new literacy studies.

Our article develops its argument through illustrative instances of feedback encounters between teachers and students, where we explore how this thinking might help us to articulate a critical approach to feedback theory and practice, by revisiting the concept of feedback literacies from an original perspective. Thinking with the concept of literacy-as-event moves us away from the view that feedback practices can usefully follow standardised approaches and instead asks us to attend to the emergent moments of learning. Crucially, we suggest that, as we expand the frame of both who and what matters within feedback literacy practices, we may be better equipped to foster meaningful interactions, and to understand a diversity of students’ experiences.

Academic literacies and literacy-as-event

The notion of literacy event has a long and well-established provenance within the field of academic literacies and new literacy studies (Brice Heath 1983; Lea and Street 1998; Street 2003; Barton 2007; Gourlay et al. 2021). Work in this area has been transformative in establishing literacies as complex, dynamic and nuanced (Lea and Street 2006, 369). Literacy is understood not simply as a technical skill but as a social practice, varying in contexts and cultures, and embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles (Lea and Street 2006, 369).

As a result, work across these fields has generated nuanced accounts of different literacy practices. Recent research by Burnett and Merchant (2020a, 2020b) extends these ideas in exciting ways. The academic literacies literature establishes the notion of literacy event as bounded literacy occurrences − for example a student writing an assignment − whilst at the same time exploring how such specific practices are always socially situated and governed by power relations. Drawing upon the work of Massumi (2002, 2011, 2015), Burnett and Merchant relate the notion of literacy event more closely to sociomaterial and relational thinking. Massumi describes the relational dimension of literacy event as ‘its immediate participation in a world of activity larger than its own’ (2011, 3). The concept of literacy-as-event then guides us to think about literacy events as emergent, fluid and as taking place within an unbounded, relational world. For example, Burnett and Merchant (2020b, 49–52) explain how:

event is generated as people and things come into relation; what happens always exceeds what can be conceived and perceived; and implicit in the event are multiple potentialities, including multiple possibilities for what might materialise as well as what does not.

For Burnett and Merchant, the notion of relationality encourages us to consider not just what happens in the occurrence, but what happens in the wider network of relations that exist beyond that happening. The idea of literacy-as-event encourages us to approach events as literacy moments, with multiple, alternative and emergent possibilities. It enables us to look afresh at how people and things come together − to ask, what can I notice? What is missing? How might the moment that I see be connected to other aspects of students’ lives? This important shift leads to new questions for educators: what particular forces, or relations, work to sustain unequal arrangements, what holds them in place and what can we do to destabilise them (Burnett and Merchant 2020a)? We now turn to explore what the concept of literacy-as-event has to offer in enabling us to develop an enriched understanding of feedback literacies.

Illustrative feedback encounters

We draw upon two examples to consider how multiple actors entangle together within a web of relations. Through these illustrative instances we explore the role of time, space, objects, affect, teachers and students, that emerge within and beyond interactions. We decided to reflect upon these specific instances in order to enable us to focus upon ephemeral literacy moments, as part of an ongoing flow of activity (Burnett and Merchant 2020b). We were also inspired by generative examples of feedback encounters in work by Esterhazy (2018) and Esterhazy and Damşa (2019). These authors explore how through examining specific feedback encounters we can attend to feedback as a process of meaning-making, and more usefully understand the dynamic and emergent character of feedback. These ideas are further developed by Jensen, Bearman, and Boud (2023), who explore how the notion of feedback encounters enable us to look again at the assumptions, intentions and agency that students bring to the interaction. Building on these interesting conceptions of feedback interaction, in this article we theorise two illustrative feedback encounters with the concept of literacy-as event, in order to illuminate the encounter’s ‘immediate participation in a world of activity larger than its own’ (Massumi 2011, 3).

Our first illustrative example features an undergraduate student seeking feedback from her tutor; while our second describes a doctoral student reflecting on interactions with her supervisor. The first was drawn from research into undergraduate students’ experiences of teaching and learning, in which students reported upon their experiences via focus groups. The second derives from research-in-progress into the contribution of feedback literacy to doctoral supervision. Our research followed institutional guidelines and received ethical approval from the relevant ethics boards. Participants have been allocated pseudonyms. Our examples are selective, literacy moments that are cut spatially and temporally. They have been chosen in order to illustrate how we might begin – tentatively − to engage literacy-as-event to consider feedback literacies as unbounded and fluid, relational and material. The encounters are drawn from two larger studies and were selected as they offer illustrations of relationality in divergent ways. In the following section, we engage the concept of literacy-as-event to understand and theorise these encounters.

Time and space in feedback literacies in undergraduate education

The following instance was drawn from a study into undergraduate students’ experiences of their university studies at a UK institution. In the example below, a business studies student (Sarah) reflects upon her specific, situated, experience. Her story is shaped by her positioning as a mature woman who is also a parent and a commuting student.

Sarah describes a feedback encounter where she is looking to talk through her assessment feedback with her tutor. She discusses how she is daunted when she arrives at her tutor’s office to see the office hours displayed on the paper sign-up-sheet sellotaped to the office door: ‘their feedback hours, I feel like sometimes there is just always a small window of space, so it might just be maybe three hours’. On this occasion Sarah explains how she was unable to find time to meet her tutor face-to-face.

Her tutor has explained that she can contact him via email, and Sarah reports how she finds her teachers to be kind and helpful. However, she feels that emails can take a long time to respond to. For her, communication online cannot replicate the experience of going through an assignment face-to-face. She describes how in her view, one on one feedback is very helpful and any ways that teachers can implement that are very useful for students, particularly if teachers encourage students to bring in the work that they’ve done so far. However, Sarah discusses how as a commuting student she has to fit in her ‘on campus time’ alongside her childcare commitments, her lecture timetable, as well as the time she can afford to pay for car parking, which she feels is expensive.

This encounter suggests the emergent quality of feedback literacies. Sarah experiences a sense of disempowerment when she sees the office hours list and a disconnect with how she anticipated the feedback interaction would materialise. This example indicates the various things and people that entangle both within and beyond the feedback literacy-as-event: time; space; imagined expectations and assumptions; the physical script of the assignment; a car park; the cost of car parking; the tutor’s office; email; the tutor themselves. These actors may enable or constrain literacy practices.

The value of Sarah’s story is not in its depiction of a thwarted feedback encounter. Indeed, it is often unrealistic for teachers to meet expectations for one to one, face-to-face feedback, and we do not suggest this signifies a lack of care on the part of teachers. Rather, the example illustrates how the literacy-as-event is situated in ‘a world of activity larger than its own’ (Massumi 2011, 3). We can see Sarah’s many preoccupations as she seeks to learn. The example suggests how literacies are produced, or not produced, in the relations between people, materials, texts, imaginaries, power relations, assumptions and expectations. As Burnett and Merchant (2020a) explain, such examples ‘encourage us to pay attention to how things unfold, to how literacy can appear (or not) as sociomaterial arrangements configure and reconfigure and to how such appearances are contingent on what happens moment to moment’ (2020a, 55).

In this case, the opportunity for engagement may not have been lost. Sarah may have explained her problem to her teacher and her teacher may have found ways to engage in further dialogue about how to improve the issue, perhaps reconsidering how and where ‘office hours’ are held and communicated. However, Sarah’s experience resonates with work by Tai et al. (2021) who remind us that feedback literacies are not something that one can possess, but instead develop within and in response to different feedback situations. Both space and time are shown to be important, the spaces for engagement and Sarah’s own sense of time, including her ‘on-campus’ time. Literacy is emergent. It emerges out of activity within situated times and spaces. This instance illustrates the socially and materially constituted nature of feedback literacies and feedback seeking, as well as the affective impact of the different actors that work together to create this experience for Sarah.

Feedback potentialities in doctoral supervision

The following example is drawn from ongoing research investigating feedback literacies in doctoral supervision. Feedback literacy-as-event foregrounds the fluidity of feedback exchanges and their potentialities: not just what happened but what might have been. The following encounter involves a year 3 mainland Chinese student (Huang) taking a four-year full-time PhD at a research-intensive university in Hong Kong. Huang describes the harmonious relationship with her supervisor, because he does not put excessive pressure on her and allows her the freedom to carry out the research in her own way and at her own pace. Face-to-face tutorials were often lengthy discussions spanning two hours or more, where as well as talking about Huang’s research, the supervisor would sometimes share relevant daily life experiences. He described, for example, handling the multiple demands of academic work by keeping healthy through hiking, and while walking in the countryside he had the time and space to reflect on some academic, family or life issues. In the following example, she reflects on whether the hiking anecdote might give rise to different ways of organising doctoral supervision.

Huang suggests that it might be productive for the supervisor to invite his students to go hiking with him in that a change of environment might stimulate new possibilities for interaction. “I think participating together in the same pleasant activity is a good way of providing additional opportunities for interaction, because hiking can make both supervisors and the students more relaxed in the fresh air, and in harmony with nature. With a more relaxing spirit, maybe students are more willing to be open with the supervisor or the supervisor may be more willing to share some thoughts with students”. In the natural environment, participants may feel the freedom to raise issues which may or may not relate to academic work. “If we can have the opportunity to go hiking with our supervisor, maybe we can have some discussions on some philosophical problems about life and nature. Even if these interactions may not be directly related to my research, it might help me to think deeply about my own life, my identity, my future direction and my academic work”.

Given the performative nature of academia, and the pressure for doctoral students to produce outputs to boost their success in a competitive job market, this idea seems at first somewhat unexpected. For Huang, however, the social element of the feedback encounter is important, and may contribute to her sense of connection with the supervisor and her doctoral peers. Again, we can see literacies as emergent and as situated in larger worlds of activity: generated as people and things affect and are affected by one another (Burnett and Merchant 2020a). Feedback encounters are unbounded, relational and spatial. Where these encounters take place and the atmosphere that is cultivated affects how participants feel. It also stimulates potentialities that exist beyond the interaction. In this specific instance, a more relaxing environment might enable different kinds of conversations and feelings to those that might happen through Zoom or in the supervisor’s office. The aspects of space and environment also carry implications for relationships: experiencing a relaxing activity together may break down some of the power differentials in supervision. The sense of relaxation generated when walking may impact on the relationship beyond the specific occasion and carry temporal implications for future interactions. A group activity, such as hiking, may also strengthen peer relations between supervisees at different stages of their doctorate. Peers may identify emotional or academic experiences that they can profitably share with each other.

Feedback literacy-as-event

The feedback encounters above offer a starting point for our thinking with the concept of feedback literacy-as-event in new and significant ways. We might challenge ourselves to consider feedback literacies not simply as practices to be developed, but generated as people and things come together, within unfolding moments. Feedback literacy-as-event enables us to think about literacies as affective, emergent, relational encounters. This understanding is important as it problematises a simple reading of the relationship between students’ motivation, engagement and feedback seeking practices, and troubles descriptions of individuals as deficient in literacy skills. Feedback seeking has been shown to be an important aspect of students’ feedback literacies, potentially providing students with multiple benefits: eliciting points that need clarification and identifying the extent to which one is on the right track (Jensen, Bearman, and Boud 2023). The examples, however, depict how feedback seeking behaviours were either impeded or enabled by a breadth of things and people within and beyond the different moments described. For Sarah, on this occasion, multiple actors work together to impede her ability to engage with feedback. In contrast, Huang enjoys the connections she has with her supervisor within the doctoral relationship. This enables supervisor and student to work together meaningfully, and Huang comments on the impact of this blurring of boundaries upon her relational experience.

Importantly, the relational literacy-as-event is shown to be a site of power relations. For Sarah, who must fit into what she perceives to be a small window of her tutor’s time, power is materially felt. Of course, this is one student’s experience of the feedback interaction, or missed interaction, and there is potential for many other interpretations. However, students’ meaning-making matters to them, and to their experience of the opportunities to develop feedback literacies. The second encounter offers an interesting alternative perspective to the ways in which power relations are often experienced within doctoral supervision (Xu 2017; Robertson 2017). For Huang, the positive relationship she reports developing with her supervisor, and their willingness to blur the boundaries of academic and social life, seems to have created a space for openness within the doctoral relationship. Although of course for a different student, within a different doctoral relationship, such a blurring may be experienced as less positive if such connections are unwelcome.

The feedback encounters suggest the emergent quality of literacies as well as the breadth of spaces, temporalities, people, emotions, ideas and things that play a role within feedback practices. These include emails; a car park; the countryside; a timetable; stories; expectations; Zoom; teachers; peers; childcare. Moments include potentialities that exceed the boundaries of the encounter: future ideas for interactions, recognition of multiple or different perspectives, and memories of previous feedback experiences. The encounters also include recurring mention to the role of affect. Feelings such as relaxed; harmony; daunted; welcoming; distant; connected; pleasant; freedom all play a role in these experiences.

Our narration is of course inevitably selective, positioned and subjective. We have selected the examples as well as choosing the ways in which to cut and frame the encounters. Indeed, this is the very point that we seek to articulate, that meaning making in these moments is subjective, multiple, elusive, inevitably partial. We follow Edwards, Ivanič, and Mannion (2009) in suggesting that the interactions offered here suggest some potential ways through which literacy researchers might begin to understand the messy conglomerations and the scrumpled geographies of literacy practices. We suggest that our readings of these encounters offer new ways of thinking about feedback literacies: as relational, emergent, and as moments that can have multiple potentialities for meaning making.

Insights and possibilities

Engaging the concept of literacy-as-event moves us away from a position where we might assume feedback practices can consistently follow generic recommendations or standardised approaches, and instead asks us to attend to the nuanced moments of learning that are subjectively felt and involve multiple possibilities. Thinking about literacies in this way requires us to ‘keep asking what is going on, to slow down and ponder the details, to acknowledge the multiplicity of meanings and possibilities that are always immanent’ (Burnett and Merchant 2020b, 52). It encourages us to adopt a noticing stance (Gourlay 2021) that asks both what is going on and what is missing, what other interpretations are possible? Burnett and Merchant (2020b) explain that such data takes us out of the realm of predictable activity and invites us to engage with the unpredictable. Reading these illustrative instances enables us to look again at feedback literacies as affective encounters, generated when people and things come together. Thinking with literacy-as-event prompts us to consider factors that impact upon students’ lives, power relations that may impede connections, or missed opportunities. Its impact lies in generating new questions. We now elaborate some of the possible questions that might be useful for educators to consider.

How is dialogue experienced?

It is well established that meaningful dialogue is a fundamental aspect of feedback literacy practices (Ajjawi and Boud 2017; Carless and Boud 2018). Moreover, the perceived quality of interaction is crucial because unproductive dialogic interactions have been shown to frustrate the student (Steen-Utheim and Hopfenbeck 2019). The illustrative examples suggest that meaningful dialogue may be facilitated by sensitivity to multiple perspectives. These depictions resonate with the work of Tai et al. (2021) and Gravett (2022), who have problematised the assumption that dialogue may act as a neutral solution in feedback practices. Rather, we might more usefully understand dialogue as ‘constrained by material-economic architectures in the times and spaces in which it occurs’ (Tai et al. 2021, 9). As educators, a view of feedback literacies as relational encourages us to slow down and to look at the complexity of dialogic interactions. It encourages us to keep asking – how is dialogue experienced and interpreted within this event? What is the significance of power relations? What is not being discussed? What alternative possibilities are there for doing things differently?

These questions may seem expansive. We suggest, however, that even small shifts in perspective, and minor changes to practice such as asking the questions posed above, can result in marginal gains (Winstone and Carless 2019), that can combine to develop student-teacher relationships and to enable significant change within learning. Recent developments in audio and video feedback practice suggest that even simple strategies, such as greeting the student by name, can help to build rapport and soften critical messages that may be needed (e.g. Sarcona, Dirhan, and Davidson 2020). Such minor shifts may simply include an awareness of feedback literacy-as-event that encourages educators to look more closely at the relationality and materiality of feedback interactions, considering the role of power relations, the challenge that dialogue may not be neutral and that meaning can be interpreted in multiple ways. Shifting our perspective in this way may encourage educators to reduce time-consuming practices which fail to align with relational conceptions of feedback interactions, for example the widely adopted practice of end-of-semester written commentaries. There is a need for deeper consideration of those feedback practices that may be formative, generative and impactful, and those that might be reduced or curtailed. Thinking relationally about feedback in this way may also encourage conceptions of feedback as a contingent element of broader teaching and learning processes (Heron et al. 2021), as well as to consider more carefully the implications of automatically associating relational feedback encounters with assessment processes (Winstone and Boud 2020).

How is care enacted?

Similarly, students experiencing a sense of care and of mattering (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021) within their studies has been shown to be a critical aspect of engagement with their learning (Sutton 2012; Gravett and Winstone 2022). Understanding literacies as relational means that educators may wish to keep asking – how is care enacted and experienced in this interaction? Huang experiences a sense of care through the positive relations and discussions she has with her doctoral supervisor. For Sarah, material constraints that inhibit her engagement with her tutor may mean she does not experience a feeling of mattering, although otherwise her tutors are kind and caring. Approaching feedback literacy-as-event with an ethic of care, and of mattering, involves continuously reflecting upon what is happening within the interaction. What can we notice by approaching feedback interactions from alternative perspectives? How might care be manifested within this encounter? What might be impeding a sense of mattering? How might relational care be revitalised within the limitations of mass higher education?

What is the significance of material actors and spaces?

The encounters suggest material things and spaces play an agential role in the relationality of the feedback interaction. Educators may want to ask what exceeds the literacy-event? What is going on, and what is not, and to consider how does this classroom, space, Zoom room, feedback artefact, email, tutorial timetable, impact upon the feedback interaction? This might include attending care-fully to the ways in which participants’ material circumstances may be shaping and impacting their learning, materialising practices of care and of mattering. It might include asking, what other ways might there be to do things differently? What do feedback interactions look and feel like from students’ perspectives? We suggest that these questions will only become increasingly important as digital and hybrid education continues to reorientate the spaces and times in which we teach and learn, creating new temporalities of on and off-campus time and new online, offline and hybrid spaces.

What things are invisible in the feedback event?

A key aspect of this approach is to acknowledge the multiplicity of experiences and to ask what things might be invisible. The tutor in encounter one is unlikely to realise how Sarah is experiencing her studies unless they are noticing, approach her and find out, although Sarah might also share her feelings with her tutor. As Burnett and Merchant explain (2020b, 51) slowing down and noticing opens us up to think about the other things that are going on that exceed the event. Pausing, attending to the event, and understanding the relational and affective aspects of the feedback interaction may prompt us to consider what else might be possible? Are there ways of implementing feedback processes differently?

Conclusions

In this article we have engaged the idea of literacy-as-event and drawn upon relational thinking and academic literacies scholarship to consider new directions for feedback literacies research in higher education. Feedback literacy is often viewed as a general competency for individuals to develop (Gravett 2022; Nieminen and Carless 2022). Drawing practice away from the cognitive framing that has dominated the feedback sub-field (and wider educational research), we have suggested some ways in which feedback literacies research can benefit from a stronger grounding in work originating from the fields of academic literacies, sociomaterial theory and new literacy studies, in order to draw links between feedback literacies and to (re)connect with generative ideas occurring within other areas of literacy scholarship. This orientation would more firmly establish the relational, emergent and contested nature of feedback literacies than is commonly present within the existing research on feedback literacy. Our rethinking also problematises the possibility of reproducible practices in higher education, as we instead consider how elements entangle together within an emergent and unfolding web of relations. Such a reorientation encourages us to shift our attention beyond the human at the centre of the pedagogical encounter, towards a noticing stance that considers what other elements matter and unfold within the educational interaction.

Such a rethinking is challenging. We openly acknowledge that such slow and thoughtful approaches do not sit comfortably with large cohort sizes, and the increasing demands placed upon teachers for measurability and generalisability that is the norm of contemporary universities. We still uphold, however, that this shift is more than a theoretical endeavour. Original ways of thinking about feedback interactions are necessary if we are to understand meaning-making from different perspectives than our own, and we suggest that thinking with some of the ideas presented, and asking new questions of our practice, can impact upon the ways in which we teach and learn.

We also suggest that thinking relationally about feedback practices is worthy of further research. We acknowledge that this paper is just the beginning of understanding what thinking with feedback literacy-as-event might offer. Feedback approaches, such as video and screencast feedback, merit further research from a literacy-as-event standpoint (Wood 2022). Future studies could also include ethnographic work that seeks to unpack both teacher and student perspectives of feedback interactions. Future feedback literacy research might also fruitfully entangle more closely with academic literacies, digital literacies or lockdown literacies (Gourlay et al. 2021) scholarship. Longitudinal research studies would also be potentially generative. Ultimately, we believe that thinking relationally about feedback literacies can generate meaningful questions. We suggest that feedback literacy research can be re-energised in a new direction, and that learning from critical approaches to literacy theory-practice can enrich and advance the work that is currently taking place in the sector.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Dr Joanna Tai, Dr Juuso Nieminen and Prof Cathy Burnett for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

David Carless would like to acknowledge the support of a Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme Award from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Feedback literacy for lifelong learning: new pathways for research and practice (HKU 37000421).