A Womanist Approach to Care-full Feedback — Teachers Going Gradeless

As the importance of feedback to student learning has become better understood over recent years, two important aspects have emerged. The first is that feedback should be dialogical rather than a one-way form of communication. The second is that feedback works when it is part of a cycle of student learning through receiving feedback and implementing that learning. Taken together, these two ideas lead us to thinking of feedback as representing a dialogic cycle or spiral.

This leads us to the contemporary espoused theory of feedback as an inherently social, dynamic and dialogic activity that involves the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community and societal factors. The implications of feedback as social, dynamic, and dialogic are, however, rarely explored. We are only just beginning to fully explore the fundamental relationships between assessment and social justice. Neither assessment nor learning are neutral or benign practices, and continuing to implicitly or explicitly treat them as such leads to the reproduction of inequalities and symbolic violence, a way of governing difference and constructing difference as Other.

In this space we offer a new way of thinking about feedback that recognizes the reality of symbolic violence, and uses womanist theory to underpin and explain a new approach we call Care-full Feedback.