2 Critical Pedagogy and Care Ethics Feedback as Care

Care-Centred Education

According to Noddings (1984), teaching from a care perspective consists of

• modelling, instructors’ genuine demonstration of caring behaviour that they expect of their students (e.g., honesty and promptness);
• dialogue, a back-and-forth conversation with learners with no prejudgment in an attempt to build relationships, develop norms, reach shared understandings, and invite deeper conversations;
• practice, opportunities for students to practise the act of caring with an explicit focus on the act of helping and supporting peers (e.g., collaborative and cooperative learning activities); and
• confirmation, the act of supporting the development of a better self by encouraging and affirming the best in others.

Central to the care-centred model of education is the relational and cyclical nature of care, in which the caring relationship between an instructor and students is complete only when the cared-for (the student) signals that the caring has been received, requiring continuous dialogue and extended interaction. From this view, students’ intellectual and personal growth is nurtured when students are engaged in critical dialogue and reflection about their learning and empowered to co-create meaning and understanding with their instructors, peers, and community. For care ethicists such as Noddings, maintaining open and genuine relationships with the cared-for does not require responding to needs that the carer deems immoral or mistaken; however, it does necessitate that the carer remains open to dialogue and listens so as to maintain caring relations. When engaging in such relationships in the classroom, the roles of instructors and students shift; rather than instructors holding all of the answers and students simply following with little or no critical or deep reflection and thinking, instructors and students are on a shared journey built upon trust in each other, respect for diversity, and hope for a better future. “By keeping open the avenues of communication, we may find a way to ameliorate the hate, distrust or rage we’ve detected and, thus, be in a better position to protect others in the web of care” (Noddings, 1984, p. 206).

Emotion and Feedback in the Digital Space

Research at the intersection of feedback and emotion in digital spaces continues to emerge. Although understanding of the relationship between feedback and emotion is still growing, available research points to the strong emotional responses that students attach to feedback (Ryan & Henderson, 2018; Shields, 2015). Studies have recently highlighted the possible negative reactions that students experience to feedback from instructors and pointed out the importance of tailoring feedback to the respective needs of students. For instance, a study at two Australian universities found that students are more likely to experience negative emotions, such as feeling discouraged or upset, after receiving critical feedback from instructors, which can affect their motivation and willingness to act on the feedback to improve their performance (Ryan & Henderson, 2018). Not only that, but also feedback has been shown to affect learners beyond their courses in ways that shape their identities as learners and boost—or hinder—their self-esteem and confidence in their abilities (Shields, 2015). We discuss two types of feedback, passive transmission and dialogic, and provide examples with additional reflection on the importance of dialogic feedback to providing a higher level of care in online courses.

Understanding the Student Experience from a Care Perspective

We are all educators and active researchers in the field of instructional design and learning technologies. To understand better the relationship among faculty online pedagogical practices, care, and the student experience, we sought to shed light on the lived experiences of students through qualitative inquiry. We gathered information through online interviews with 14 participants who had taken at least one online class at a public university in the United States. Eight participants identified as female and two as male, and four chose not to identify a gender. All but one participant had a college degree and ranged in age from 25 to over 55. In our narrative analysis, we used the four elements of the framework of Noddings: modelling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation. Our online meetings and discussions provided us with the opportunity to clarify our individual perspectives and try to understand better how each of us—the research team—interpreted the information garnered from the interviews conducted with students. Our method was deeply reflective, and we kept written entries to develop a thick description of findings (Lincoln, 1985). These reflections are woven into our discussion on student feedback for this chapter as we explore and interpret the good and poor examples encountered in our research from a care perspective.

What Do Students Say about Feedback When Learning Online?

When we interviewed online students to find out what was most important to them in their educational experiences, they reported feedback (in terms of responsiveness, quality, scaffolding learning, and demonstrating caring) as critical to their learning processes. The responsiveness of instructors means much more than simply the timely provision of feedback; it also includes being responsive to questions, discussion posts, emails, and other communications that students send. We found that, during the first and last semester of 2020 (in the beginning and middle of the COVID-19 pandemic), students used emails more frequently than in previous semesters to inquire about assessment deadlines and to discuss health-related issues. The timeliness of responses, flexibility with deadlines, and understanding were appreciated. Indeed, research shows that such communications demonstrate to students that they and their opinions and positions are cared for, supported, and valued in the teaching and learning experience.

Also, though feedback is critical to the process of teaching and learning, there are both positive and negative effects of such feedback in regard to influencing emotions. For instance, timely feedback that is simply a number grade is less effective than a detailed summary of how students can improve their work or feedback specific to a student’s assignment or task. Feedback can and should provide thoughtful scaffolding so that students feel supported and cared for in their learning journeys. Personalized and thoughtful feedback on their work evokes hope, whereas the anticipation of standard feedback instigates feelings of anxiety (Pekrun et al., 2014).

Feedback and Supporting Students

Some of the negative issues related to feedback arise when there is a lack of responsiveness from the instructor. When faculty do not offer proper feedback, students can be left feeling that they are not properly supported. One student shared the experience of wanting to drop a class because of the lack of instructor feedback and support, but doing so would have meant graduating a semester later, the only reason that the student chose to remain in the class. Unclear communication can also lead to frustration in a student. As one student stated, “I had one course where the instructor almost never responded to inquiries in a timely manner. This was especially difficult when assignments were close to deadline. When responses were received, they tended to be unhelpful and required multiple back-and-forth emails to get usable information.”

It is important as an instructor to be consistent with the quality and timeliness of feedback. If something has changed that will delay one’s ability to respond, then it should be communicated effectively to students. In our interviews, students indicated that getting proper and adequate feedback quickly was extremely important to them. Delays in feedback typically affect students’ ability to reflect on their learning, especially if they are working in isolation. One student shared that “the most challenging thing I think for me is when we’re doing an online course, and it goes a long time without any feedback from submitted assignments. So you’re submitting assignments over and over again over several weeks and not getting any feedback.” Another student lamented that “there were a few times that feedback on assignments was not provided in time to make improvements.”

Such situations lead to frustration among students and diminish the feelings of trust and care that might have been established early in the learning experience. If a student emailed the instructor privately to get clarity about an assignment or feedback, then the response might be helpful for other students to know. The information could be shared in an announcement or discussion forum so that all students in the course could benefit from it.

Clarity and Unclarity

When students are asked to complete complex assignments that require them to spend many hours preparing the deliverable (project, paper, etc.), they have an expectation that it will be read, viewed, reviewed, and critiqued thoughtfully. One student shared this experience: “I had one course where . . . all of a sudden, one day, all these assignments were graded at the same time, and I’m thinking where was the care and the effort put into really reading what I submitted, or did I just spend all that time for very little?”

Personalized feedback supports the student-teacher relationship. Instructors should make it obvious to students that assignments are being reviewed and provide them with feedback that is detailed, scaffolded, and specific to support their learning. This practice demonstrates care, as evident in this comment: “In one of my courses, I was required to blog weekly. A particular instructor I had always took the time to leave a specific response to my blog posting. I felt this instructor cared so much for students that they were willing to take the time to read each individual posting. This to me was admirable as many posts were long.”

Clear feedback—specific and actionable—is also valued by students. Descriptive and qualitative feedback that presents modelling of the expected outcome is more valued than simply a score. The back-and-forth discourse generated by thoughtful comments from the instructor is perceived as caring about students. As one of the students interviewed said, “I think it makes a big difference when an instructor actually puts a comment in, they actually read it versus just a grade, and so to me it seems like I don’t feel quite as cared for or there isn’t quite as much care [when just a grade is given].”

This type of discourse by the instructor can also take the forms of voice and video, and they were mentioned in our interviews as ways that educators can provide quality feedback. Students not only associated video feedback with a quality response but also deemed it a demonstration that the instructor cared about them. One student shared that “the use of video feedback from a few teachers has proven that some teachers care about the well-being of their students in an online course.”

Care for Students

Our research demonstrates that educators should not underestimate the complexity of students’ emotional investment in learning. Dialogue with students is one way, Noddings (1984) suggests, that educators demonstrate caring for. One can demonstrate such care for students by taking a personal interest in them and how they are doing in addition to their work. Investing time in dialogue with students to check on them on a personal level via email, text, audio, or video formats is valued by learners since it shows a level of care for them beyond the course. Scaffolding support for students with such dialogue manifested itself in our interviews in statements such as “being told that a project had real potential for future development,” which gives learners confirmation that they are moving forward in the right direction and making progress. One learner said that “I was very confused with a topic and emailed my professor for clarification on an issue. They not only responded with great detail but asked follow-up questions to make absolutely sure I understood.”

It is this dialogue with faculty that supports learning and empowers students to push forward in their learning. Feedback is one of many ways that instructors demonstrate that they care for students and can greatly affect outcomes through meaningful discourse. As we have highlighted in this section, students value timely feedback, quality interactions with instructors, and a sense that faculty truly care for them. Consistency in the timing and quality of feedback, as well as the clarity of messages received, can have very positive influences on the student’s journey. When feedback is detailed and personalized, and shows that instructors care for students and their success, it is valued and makes a difference in how students perceive being cared for through their learning.

Implications

We would like to expand our findings presented to the broader discussion on critical pedagogy and the ethics of care, connecting what our participants said to our experiences as instructors in terms of criticality in education. Critical theory and pedagogy seek to promote learning experiences that are transformative and empowering for both students and teachers. Some of the criticism of critical pedagogy concerns its overemphasis on abstract notions and that “the discourse of critical pedagogy constructs and sustains its own disciplinary affects . . . which may well be repressive” (Zembylas, 2013, p. 177). As educators, we must be cognizant of the complexity of emotions triggered by the enactment of critical pedagogy and practices and support learners individually and collectively in ways that empower them to think critically about their own realities to effect change not only for themselves but also for the world around them. From the perspectives of Freire (1971) and hooks (2003, 2014), learning communities centred on caring relationships with students who are valued as whole people—taking socio-cultural, -economic, or -political contexts into consideration—can facilitate learning and growth. Combining the principles of ethics of care and critical digital pedagogy theory has the potential to overcome some of these barriers to implementing critical digital pedagogy.

We posit that digital technologies can be used to support critical pedagogy, specifically when it comes to feedback and care, in a variety of ways, as evident in the statements by students in the research presented in this chapter. Some of the key issues addressed in our analysis relate to students’ needs in receiving responses to questions, seeing instructors’ participation on discussion boards, email responses, announcements, and other communications in a timely fashion. Timeliness was important, but so was the quality and clarity of feedback. All of these aspects can be supported and facilitated using digital technologies with students to lay the foundation for critical pedagogical efforts to succeed and thrive.

We acknowledge the difficulties that many instructors face when attempting to enact more open and flexible pedagogies that address students’ needs on both collective and individual levels while conforming to institutional and academic pressures stemming from accreditation requirements and increasing students’ achievement on standardized tests (Noddings, 2012). Although this requires a complete re-evaluation of the aims and purposes of education, beyond the control of instructors, there are some pedagogical practices and online design considerations that individual instructors can implement in their classrooms. We are currently rethinking our pedagogical efforts because of what students have experienced and their expressed needs in the semesters taught during the COVID-19 pandemic. Allowing flexibility in due dates, encouraging group efforts for projects (if chosen), and establishing peer help forums are several approaches that we have used.

A pedagogical approach that we have used recently is to remove the standard requirement of one initial post and two responses in a forum activity. A discussion is launched by the instructor with a research article and prompt or case, but students have the choice to reply or build upon the ideas of an existing post. We hope to have students connect on a higher level by crafting thoughtful replies through feedback or referring peers to different ideas and sources, using video responses too if they are comfortable doing so. The goals are to build upon an idea or discussion and to analyze different angles as opposed to presenting a new idea with each thread. We want to build community and encourage dialogic peer-to-peer feedback with this small change to the traditional use of a discussion forum.

We have reflected on the importance of dialogic feedback in creating a climate of care, inclusion, and equity, and our methods are evolving with the fruition of our research and understanding. An online course requires additional time and effort for both instructor and student to engage in meaningful communication that focuses on learning because there is often one-way communication (instructor to students). However, both teachers and students learn and benefit from two-way feedback and communication. For students, this type of relationship with the instructor enhances their sense of ownership of and agency over their learning, and in turn it empowers them to think critically and independently about the world around them. For instructors, this ongoing dialogic relationship with their students allows them to know their students at a deeper level, which enables them to provide genuine and relevant feedback. The dialogic method can help teachers to work toward the ideal of social justice in a course and equity in the online space. If we use feedback and other communication with students as a diagnostic tool for overall course improvement, then we might be able to reduce implicit bias by considering all voices. This is a continuous improvement cycle that can develop a communicable place of learning based upon a healthy feedback loop. The involvement can empower students and prompt constructive change.

How students feel about their learning can matter even more for vulnerable and marginalized students. Many of our students are working parents and community college students living in remote rural areas and juggling life with added COVID-19 pandemic concerns. They are trying their best to complete each semester and the goals that they set. Students contact us about physical and mental health concerns, lack of access to software because of campus closures, and personal struggles that they are facing during the pandemic. They have heightened emotions, and timely and appropriate communication might be the nudge that helps them to continue pursuing their school work and goals. Active listening, dialogue, trust, and openness without judgment (Noddings, 2012) have been the core of our online courses, but those in the semesters during the pandemic have intensified the importance and reconsideration of the methods used.

Equality and empowering students in the online learning space are important considerations in the discussion of digital technologies and the practice of critical pedagogy and care ethics. Future research would be beneficial in identifying modes of feedback and how different modes affect students in digital spaces. In particular, feedback as dialogue allows students to have equitable roles (Carless, 2017; Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017) when applied to digital classrooms. We believe that the principles underlying a care ethics approach to learning and education can overcome the challenges facing educators in the enactment of critical theory and pedagogy in a virtual space and enable the creation of a safe environment in which critical education can emerge and take shape.

Key Takeaways

• Feedback received from instructors can significantly influence and shape the student learning experience at an emotional/affective level.
• Dialogic feedback plays an important role in creating a climate of care in an online learning space and supports the enactment of critical pedagogical practice.
• Both teachers and students can benefit from dialogic feedback.
• Digital technologies play a vital role in the provision of feedback from a care ethics perspective.

References