Written Feedback as a Relational Practice: Revealing Mediating Factors

ABSTRACT Teacher educators’ practices include providing written feedback to preservice teachers. Aims of written feedback include providing information to preservice teachers about their ideas and practices as well as sustaining ongoing relationships. In this article we argue that factors mediating written feedback practice support the informational purposes of feedback while displacing time and space for relational purposes. This argument stems from our self-study using dialogic analysis of three mathematics teacher educators’ conversations and narratives about our written feedback. Analysis of our narratives and transcripts of conversations focused on written feedback practice through the lens of relational teacher education. We found three factors that mediated our written feedback practices: our mathematics identities, assignment structures, and accreditation. To illustrate the factors we share three vignettes crafted from transcripts of conversations and narratives of our written feedback. These themes, while unique to our contexts, illustrate ways teacher educators’ explicit values and goals for teaching about teaching can be crowded out by unexamined factors living within enactments of professional practice. Our findings are contextually bound, but coupled with other self-studies of written feedback illustrate that written feedback practice is informed by teacher educators’ values and context.