Exploring the notion of teacher feedback literacies through the theory of practice architectures

Abstract

Feedback literacy research has largely focussed on learner processes and how teachers can support them. However, a socio-material perspective on feedback as a situated practice foregrounds the interplay between actors, resources, contexts and structures, requiring a repositioning of teachers as entangled with others within practice. This merits further exploration of teacher feedback literacies. We undertake this exploration through the theory of practice architectures, which enables us to interrogate the structures which influence the possibilities for feedback practices and illustrate them in a constructed exemplar. This approach highlights the interrelatedness of teacher and learner practices, and that knowing not only one’s own role, but how practices are co-produced, is part of feedback literacies. Teacher feedback literacies might then be considered as learning to negotiate, align and resist with/in/against the structures which continue to re-make and reproduce ‘old ways’ of doing feedback. This creates a notion of teacher-learner feedback literacies, where teacher feedback literacies are not a separate capability, but entangled and embodied knowing and acting. Efforts to develop feedback literacies must turn to embedded but explicit experiential learning about feedback. Teachers and students should be prepared for possibilities in emergent interactions, rather than following feedback formulae.