Feedback And Remote Teaching and Learning: What We Are Missing

I sent a version of this blog post to a friend of mine yesterday via text and I ended it with, "thank you for coming to my TED Talk, lol." So thank you, blog readers, for coming to my TED Talk on feedback and how feedback, or more specifically lack of certain types of feedback, in our remote teaching and learning environment can cause issues for folk. I am prefacing this with a content warning (CW) that this blog post will talk about mental health and schizophrenia. 

So this would not be me writing a blog post if I didn't pull out the etymology. The word feedback actually has its origins in the 1920s where it specifically referred to the kind of technological reverberation that we experience in audio situations. Referencing feedback in relation to the kind of iterative, ideally supportive process, that we know it in terms of educational spaces or even work environments, did not come about until the 1950s (which makes sense if we think of the rise of corporate culture). But both of these origins are important to this post because I am going to speak about missing those reverberations and opportunities for support. 

I have been thinking about feedback this week after reading a book by Pillay that was suggested to me by Beth at Sacred Heart University (thanks Beth!) and finally having the space to review my notes from the UDLHE Digicon and the EDC conference. In the book there was discussion on how lack of feedback can adversely affect your ability to work and most certainly will affect your ability to multitask in any way. When we work we need that feedback on a regular basis to know if we should continue on the path we are going on or to change our strategies. We do this with our students when we give them reflective feedback in the hopes that their written work becomes better as process. We do this with our colleagues and co-workers when we are working on a project and something seems to either be working well or not working at all and needs a course change. I hear all the Agile PM lovers who read this (maybe 1 person lol), or those with an Instructional Design background (like me) who are saying as they read this "yes iterative process!" And I agree, definitely, but what happens when you don't have feedback on a regular basis or what happens if that feedback is now delivered in a different way?

What I have been thinking about for weeks and easily months actually, is how I lack the kind of feedback in my life that that people who have humans in their house receive on a regular basis. One does not realize how important those "how was your day?" conversations are until you have no ability or person to have those conversations with in a meaningful way. Yes you could text a friend, sure you could have a 30 minute quick Zoom or FaceTime with someone if your schedules align. But those are quick and those are not sustaining, and often those are not really meaningful conversations. It usually starts with 10 minutes of omg this pandemic, hey what have you cooked lately?, how's your cat/dog? and then it's over. And what do you do with the silence after? How do you process and find that feedback you need to keep going or change course?

What ends up happening instead (in my case and I am in sure with many others) is that all of that silence becomes affective labour. Before I continue this is where I strongly suggest you read Lee Skallerup Bessette and Susannah McGowan's article on affective labour that was just published this week. My running gag in my family is my Nonna's comment about how she used to talk to her pots and pans and it was only until the pots and pans start talking back that we should be worried. It was the running gag until my brother was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and household objects talking back became a family reality. This is not me saying I am hearing voices, this is not a call for help. This is rather a perspective building post which another friend called "heavy, but necessary." 

I spend a lot of time in my head because I don't have people to get that feedback from. I know that is a product of my positionality, and it happens and I am certainly not the only one who has been in this position for the past year. I don't necessarily think it is sustainably healthy, but it is what it is. I don't think we talk enough about how that feedback is missing from our lives because of the pandemic. I mean we talk around it, about how we are missing bodily cues, how some instructors really dislike the power that is lost when students actually use their own empowered positionality and have their cameras off in synchronous meetings, but we never really talk about that feedback loss. Both Jen Ward and Aisha Haque mentioned the tension between what we say to each other in public and what we say in private in their EDC sessions. I have been feeling that public/private divide a lot this week and the need to live in that liminal space. 

To be an effective ED I need to reflect (which I have now built into my schedule, thanks Tyler) and I also need to be aware of what actions I am repeating that have good outcomes, and what actions I am repeating that have not so great outcomes. Not having space to reflect was a not so great outcome so I now fixed that. Not having regular feedback or a space for regular meaningful feedback I have also identified as a not so great outcome and this post is my attempt to start the conversation of what having spaces for meaningful feedback looks like in practice in a pandemic because I know I am not alone in this feeling at all (and I can't spend any more time on Twitter than I already do). One thing that would probably fit this would be the great conversation I had with the Trauma Aware Framework Discussion group on Thursday. I felt it was a great place to give and receive feedback, though I also worry about me dominating the conversation so if that is the case y'all need to tell me in the Slack group. Just because I started this doesn't mean I get to be the voice; but I also know and acknowledge that when that happens it's because I am just so really happy to see people and have people to talk to so I can get rambley. I actively try to get better at this but I feel I may be getting worse at it as the pandemic goes on. 

So yes discussion groups are good, but then there's the tension of more screen time. Do we start using the phone, for like you know, talking like it used to be used for? I know that for a lot of people phone calls give them anxiety (I used to be one of these people), but maybe our relationship to the phone can and has necessarily changed because of the pandemic? What other low tech options do we have? Many people journal; some people write long blogs on a Sunday, lol. Canada Post now tried to have folk write post cards to each other. Is this another solution to this feedback problem? It is certainly not instantaneous, but maybe is an equally valid place for needed for connection. Do you have ideas on what these feedback spaces look like? I know this is sort of a variation on the theme that I spoke to a few weeks ago.  I guess I am going to keep asking this question until I find some sort of feasible equitably applicable answer. Or until someone decides (or has the spoons) to call me and get me out of my head. 

Books I read this week

Creativity and Critique in Online Learning: Exploring and Examining Innovations in Online Pedagogy. Eds. Jacqueline Baxter, George Callaghan and Jean McAvoy.

Read review of Creativity and Critique here

Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education. Eds. Helen J .Chatterjee and Leonie Hannan

Read review of Engaging the Senses here

Ticker Dabble Doodle Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind. By Srini Pillay

Read review of Pillay's book here