Relational feedback in ITE as reconfigured conversation: the knower as known, and concepts of the self

Giving students feedback in an avowedly practical context, such as teacher education, is fraught with issues of agency, authority and acknowledged or assumed power, as well as the time pressures in which such feedback can be given. In this contribution, whilst carefully distinguishing between differing concepts of hierarchy that govern the professional relationship between feedback giver and receiver, I reconfigure those relationships usually assumed in feedback conversations, in order to explore relationally the conversations we have with teaching students, in which we as actors/leaders, as knowers/known and as moral agents are all involved in developing skills and dispositions in teachers-to-be. I argue from the work of Palmer (being knower and known), from Bakhtin (engaging ‘the architectonic self’ to secure the ontological and relational character of pedagogy), the conceptions of the self in the work of Butler, Levinas and Wirzba (the ‘unwilled susceptibility’ open to interruption), and the discipline of ‘noticing’ derived from the work of Mason to offer different ways to reconfigure student teachers’ experience in reflecting/receiving feedback on their teaching; enhance their intellectual freedom and criticality in the work they have committed themselves to and reaffirm relationship at the centre of pedagogy.