Putting the ‘Feed’ Back in ‘Feedback’: Nourishing Relationships for Justice

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how teacher learners in a justice-oriented graduate certificate program in the U.S. cognitively and socially constructed feedback as a concept and practice. By analyzing the feedback narratives the participants told, as well as the interactions between participants’ sensemaking and my own, I sought to uncover the dominant and disruptive ideologies underlying their constructs of feedback and how the ideological sensemaking that occurred in their shared educational community did and did not contribute to and shift those constructs. I found that 1) feedback practices and narratives always occur on multiple spectra, drawing on multiple disruptive and dominant ideologies at the same time, and 2) members of educational communities are always, through ideological sensemaking, weaving together pre-existing and persisting cognitive constructs of feedback with socially constructed feedback practices as they navigate power dynamics in learning relationships. Finally, I imagine justice-oriented feedback as a multifaceted and complex learning journey and present a working model to support designing for disruptive ideological sensemaking around feedback.