Assessment & Feedback blog takeover: The challenge of emotional connections within students, in a marketised service model university setting: How can we use audio to spark a more authentic, dialogic approach to feedback?

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 By Gareth Bramley

a collection of speech bubbles and thought bubbles, in different colours like pink, blue, orange and yellow, against a white background



Educational literature is replete with examples of writing on the topic of a neoliberal, marketised Higher Education academy setting, with authors describing this as a contemporary ‘crisis’ point. I certainly feel the pull of a service, consumerist model of delivering marking and feedback, and its framing as common sense for both staff and students. The challenges of resisting such a narrative are significant, but I have often reflected how forming a more collective, emotional connection between students and staff, that pushes back against the ‘value for money’ messaging, holds potential. In particular, by encouraging conversations that work against narrow perceptions of what ‘success’ versus ‘failure’ looks like for those operating in HE, could be a way of rejecting the service model

Now, on one level, a change of approach towards audio feedback can appear very self-limiting without addressing some of the wider challenges of factors such as: over-assessing students, reductive assessment design, lack of clarity over ‘authentic’ assessment approach for students and so forth. However, I do see audio feedback as a way of encouraging a more emotive, empathetic attitude with students. As Kate Campbell-Pilling has already set out in her blog, there is clear evidence of at least starting a great connection and dialogue with students through audio feedback.

This view is supported by literature on the subject, albeit there is also an acknowledgment that data collection from students and staff of audio feedback experience remains under-developed (most probably because audio feedback is often not widely taken up across HE programmes). What data exists, is encouraging “there was strong data from both tutors and students that these perceptions of presence led on, for some, to perceptions of connection between them” (Turnbull 2022, p.117). Further, “Audio-visual technologies may have something to offer in the rebuilding of emotionally aware pedagogic relationships fractured by contextual change” (ibid). During my brief personal data collections on audio feedback from students, I have noted similar experiences. 



So, albeit as part of a wider picture of developing change, I believe audio feedback could have the potential to embrace a more caring and emotional connection between students and the academy within which they study. And this can specifically rally against the more cold, homogenous and procedural aspects of ‘traditional’ written feedback alone. 

Studying at university is an emotional, subjective and conflicting experience; working at a university can be just the same. Most starkly is the pressure to perform within a marketised academy setting, whereby neither staff nor students feel able to step away from the performance. This of course can be overwhelming and dispiriting. Although there is no clear answer or resolution to such feelings, it feels long overdue to better acknowledge the setting of university that staff and students find themselves in. So, in particular encouraging a dialogue of recognising the human experience behind the ideal of the self-sufficient, rational and capable student navigating HE; and this approach being commenced through the sharing of a more emotional connection with students through voice. 


References: Turnbull, A (2022). Feeling feedback: screencasting assessment feedback for tutor and student well-being. The Law Teacher. 56 (1). Pp. 105-118

Gareth Bramley is a University Teacher in Clinical and Legal Education at the School of Law.