Feedback-giving as social practice: teachers’ perspectives on feedback as institutional requirement, work and dialogue

Abstract

The lived experience of academic teachers as they engage in feedback has received relatively little attention compared to student perspectives on feedback. The present study used an ethnographically informed methodology to investigate the everyday practices around undergraduates’ writing of fourteen UK HE teachers, in a range of disciplines and institutions, focusing on teachers’ perspectives. This paper presents analysis of interviews conducted as part of the study, in which feedback-giving emerged as significant, understood by participants in several potentially dissonant ways: as institutional requirement, as work and as dialogue. Findings suggest participants sometimes managed to reconcile these conflicts and carve out small spaces for dialogue with students, and also indicate that attempts to create greater opportunities for such work, by offering greater support and recognition at institutional level, must take account of teachers’ need for a sense of personal investment in student writing in their disciplinary contexts.

Keywords:

• feedback
• marking
• student writing
• dialogue
• academic literacies

Notes

1. Responses to the NSS in the UK and elsewhere have consistently shown poorer ratings nationally for assessment and feedback than for any other broad category (Nicol 2010, 502).