Teaching through feedback
Debates about feedback can be fraught because the concerns of different stakeholders don’t align. NSS figures indicate that students feel they aren’t always provided with “the right opportunities to feedback on [their] course” and that feedback is not always “acted on.” Tutors counter that student feedback can be opaque and contradictory, or that students ask for things that are already in place. University leaders are frustrated when participation and response rates are low.
There are opportunities for convergence: It would be both cynial and plain wrong to assume that all three groups aren’t interested in ensuring that classroom dynamics are geared towards engagement, effective learning and, old-fashioned as the term may sound, happiness. Some call it ‘resonant relationships’ between tutors, students, and content.
Let me start with an inconvenient truth: Resonant relationships take time. Feedback exercises that go beyond a tick-box exercise require actual, serious classroom time. There are no shortcuts to happiness.
So how do we avoid that time spent on feedback exercises does not mean cutting back on unit content? There are actually several answers to this question, but I’ll focus on one here: The way for feedback exercises to not compete with ‘content time’ is to make feedback exercises themselves a site of exploring and advancing unit content. Teaching through feedback, you might say.
Poststructuralist feedback
What can this look like? In a first-year unit on German literature and film we introduce students to a range of literary theories, in order to equip them to analyse works of art in the rigorous and systematic way required of academic research. (Actually, we want them to be able to have a response ready when their friends accuse them of studying a subject where they just ‘give their opinion.’) One of the theories we introduce is poststructuralism, in its Barthesian incarnation.
Barthes’ core aim is to get readers of literature out of their consumer mentality, where they passively receive a classical text, are told to shut up and accept it, and may at best be able to assume the posture of a ‘referendum voter’ whose choices are a binary Yes (I’ll keep reading) or No (Where’s my phone?). Instead, Barthes wants a reader whose attitude is productive and engaged, who adds to the work by drawing connections with other texts, and their own lives, and gradually discovers the joy of intellectual playfulness, and the presence of diverse ‘entrances’ to a work that had previously seemed uniform. Barthes calls this un-reverential attitude a ‘minor earthquake.’ It dethrones the text; it gives statues the graffiti treatment; it celebrates diversity and intersectionality; it objects to the mentality of expecting to be pampered based on having paid good money.
My colleagues on the unit teaching team and I have taken the view that a lot of this mirrors the attitude we would hope for from students giving us feedback. In fact, it also mirrors the attitude we might take to receiving and acting on feedback. Rather than (implicitly) putting ourselves on a pedestal and expecting students to raise or lower their thumbs, we see feedback as a way to advance the course together, rather than a method for some to pass a verdict on others.
Make it yellow!
So here’s what we did. The unit has a reader of about fifty poems. We asked students, during a workshop session, to pick one line from the entire reader as their answer to the question: “How has your experience of the unit been so far?” Each student wrote their line on a yellow post-it note. Students were encouraged to write another line, including one they themselves came up with, on another post-it note. We then gave them ten minutes collectively to arrange their notes into a meaningful pattern whilst we were waiting (we don’t smoke so we awkwardly looked at our phones) outside.
When we came back, the students had done what we had hoped for. Their post-its contained wonderful lines – from wonderful poems, elevated through the way in which they were presented in this intensely social situation, and of their own – and they had arranged them in a wavy garland on a very long table.
First responders
Quite in awe, we read what the students had written and composed, and picked out some favourites lines. We took pictures of the whole thing, and went away to digest their work. Our response then came in three forms, two written and one practical.
In a two-part written response, I addressed first the format and then the content of the poststructuralist feedback poem. In terms of the format, I focused on ambiguity and the way we pose questions and expect or give answers. I highlighted that it is not the case that, say, statements made via BLUE are straightforward and our yellow notes were ambiguous. In actual fact, both are in need of interpretation. In terms of questions, or questionnaires, the power of respondents is often overestimated. Phenomenological research has long argued that those who phrase the question often determine the terms of engagement. What is more, they put themselves in a position where others need to react. Respondents may have choices, but questioners have already made important decisions. These are issues at play in both feedback exercises themselves, however they are calibrated, and our specific unit, which deals with the dynamics of interpretation. Through our exercise, we collapsed, in a rather postmodern way I suppose, the categorical difference between poetry and feedback.
The second part of my written response drew out some themes from the chosen lines. There was a clear preponderance of quotations involving the power of song (“One day I’ll die! But my song will not go to the grave with me!”), and the importance of very big issues (“Lead us from star to star, step by step”; “For what binds our fabric together?”). First-person lines seem to express student sentiment directly: “And yet my spirits still were bold.” And there was certainly the opportunity to use the exercise to be critical: “Stop judging me. Please let me go.” In drew out these themes in my response and was able to talk about the way literature inspires community, including the learning community we experience and shape in a classroom, and the role of judgment (assessment).
These issues then, thirdly, fed into the way we have been approaching the unit in the week or two since consolidation week, allowing us more directly to address student interests and concerns.
Safety advice
Are there any downsides to this exercise? Sure. It is un-digital, and un-metric, making it harder to compare it as data with feedback gathered in other units. This can be resolved. Qualitative data is data too, and computational language processing makes it easier to identify trends, especially at scale.
One thing that this exercise does not do is what is sometimes expected of feedback: to allow students to raise concerns about things that are seriously going wrong. We take the view that if things are very serious indeed, feedback to the person responsible is not the best way forward anyway. There is a difference between feedback and whistleblowing, and the University offers plenty of viable routes for students to highlight serious failings in pedagogical practice.
Let’s end give the final word to two post-its that we are still evaluating: “There are still songs to be sung on the other side of mankind.” And: “Come on in we are talking about PUPPIES! Dr Fricker.”
Do give us feedback!
Hi Christophe, thanks for sharing the approach – it sounds very engaging and I’m looking forward to trying something similar in my own teaching context. I’m just wondering how much of students’ own writing was in the post-it notes compared to lines from the poems, and also whether your choice of source text poems from the reader influenced the nature of the feedback comments. Will you be considering the same approach with different source texts? Thanks, Joe