Cogent Social Sciences

Readjusting the Feedback Lens: Feedback Relationality and Dialogues

Navigating feedback is not neutral. It is intimately linked to questions of power and situatedness within our affective contexts, whether in educational spaces, in the social sphere or in the workplace. The ways people encounter feedback can create friction, demanding adjustment or change, which may interact with one’s identity or values. Feedback interactions are not viewed as the linear communication of fixed messages but are rather conceptualised as fluid teaching moments that emerge in relation to one another and within a socio-material context impacted by power dynamics and invisible elements. These feedback moments can be met with acceptance, negotiation, resistance or even refusal. The creation of a dialogic space between the feedback actors thus becomes essential. In attending to the dialogic processes engaged in feedback encounters and their specific contexts for (in)action, we can better understand how power circulates when attempting to achieve a certain feedback goal.

Research has long focused on framing feedback as the communication of value-neutral information with the aim to improve learning outcomes or behaviours. This approach is primarily monological, leaving limited space for dialogue. With this Collection, we depart from this framing and instead, embrace a dialogic paradigm, positioning feedback and its literacies as relational acts. This lens makes room for interrogating how identity is transformed as well as how power is shared, reproduced or resisted in different feedback settings. By exploring feedback relationally, aspects such as trust, care and agency become apparent alongside a better understanding of the world we live in and what it calls us to pay attention to. In taking this angle, we can uncover invisible aspects surrounding feedback encounters (e.g., power dynamics, misunderstandings, mistrust, assumptions, microaggressions). As a result, we can gain insight and even improve both our policies and practices, to make feedback more dialogic.

This Article Collection welcomes, but is not limited to, qualitative and creative pieces that honour the contribution of lived and embodied experiences such as auto-ethnography accounts, case-studies, critical discourse analysis, story-telling approaches and narrative inquiry. We encourage teachers to draw from their classroom practices, scholars to engage in playful theoretical inquiry, and entrepreneurs to share their sense-making journeys in navigating the feedback currents.

Topics can include (but are not limited to):

1. Feedback dialogues in the classroom or in the workplace: Recounting accounts of feedback dialogues in actions, such as through feedback talk, coaching, or feedback-seeking processes.
2. Mistrust and agency in feedback interactions: Examining how feedback dialogues shape (mis)trust and agentic behaviour in different contexts.
3. Feedback cultures and ecologies: Exploring feedback cultures through a system or ecological lens to attend to the inter- and intra-actions that shape the conditions of feedback dialogues.
4. Feedback dialogues and power dynamics: Analyzing how power dynamics, positionality, and privilege influence feedback engagement and enable or disable dialogue.
5. Resistance and negotiation when encountering feedback: Examining resistance to feedback and pointing to question of epistemic and social in/justice.

For this Article Collection, the emphasis will be placed on feedback relationality and/or feedback dialogues, placing an emphasis on the importance of human connections. Articles solely focused on (Gen)AI will not be considered for this Article Collection.

When submitting to this Collection, please be sure to select both the name of the Collection, as well as the "Sociology" section when prompted in the submission portal.

Leonie Brummer (she/her) is currently a researcher at HAN University of Applied Sciences. The topic of feedback is central to her educational research she has conducted over the years. Currently she is conducting research on the requirements of assessment literacy in primary and secondary education and the practical side feedback-seeking behaviour (FSB) and to what extent FSB can facilitate feedback dialogues.

Sam Passeport (she/her/hers) is an Educationalist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her doctoral research at the University of Dundee explored students’ experiences of teacher feedback, using creative research methods (Narrative Frames and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis), centering critical and relational pedagogies and treating feedback as a dialogic encounter.

The Guest Advisors do not have any conflicts of interest to disclose.

For more information about this Collection, please contact the Commissioning Editor, Dr. Molly Cole, at molly.cole@taylorandfrancis.com.