Search

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study seeking to investigate how student teachers, within a three-year undergraduate programme, understand feedback. Feedback has been central to debates and discussion in the assessment literature in recent years. Hence, in this paper, feedback is positioned within the often-contradictory discourses of assessment, including perspectives on student and teacher feedback. The study focused on two first year undergraduate student teachers at a small university in England and considered the relationships between their understanding of feedback as a student, their understanding of feedback as an emerging teacher, and the key influences shaping these understandings. A phenomenological case study methodology was employed with interviews as the prime method of data collection. Themes emerged as part of an Nvivo analysis, including emotional responses, relationships and dialogue, all of which appear to have impacted on the students' conceptual understanding of feedback as indelibly shaped by its interpersonal and affective, rather than purely cognitive or ideational, dimensions. The paper therefore seeks to contribute to the wider feedback discourse by offering an analysis of empirical data. Although situated within English teacher education, there are tentative conclusions that are applicable to international teacher education and as well as higher education more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptually and practically, feedback typically sits within a pedagogical, rather than a philosophical, framework. Drawing on a longitudinal study with student teachers seeks, this paper seeks to critically reframe feedback beyond the pedagogical by considering the moral tensions and ethical dilemmas within feedback, thereby revealing an inherent duality in feedback as a phenomenon. Specifically, the study followed a group of student teachers through their three-year teacher education programme in order to explore their experiences and conceptions of feedback as these developed during their degree. Key to the study is the unique situation of student teachers as givers and receivers of feedback; but it also arises from their unique exposure to the neoliberal policy climate, as a consequence of the penetration of initial teacher education by high stakes regulatory mechanisms that may be at odds with the student teachers' emerging professional judgement. As such, what we are calling the 'double indemnity' of feedback is partly informed by the participants' dual and conflicted experiences as a learner and teacher but also by losses of innocence, optimism and sense of efficacy they experience as part of their development within the moral economies of feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]