Writing as a Social Act: The Feedback Relation as a Context for Political and Ethical Becoming

This paper analyzes written feedback on student writing as a relational site of political education, learning, and becoming. Research on written feedback often defines the goals of feedback in terms of improved writing, while critical literacies often aim to foster critical social analysis and political action. Building on and expanding both views, we consider the role of students’ experiences with feedback and writing in everyday forms of ethical thought and relationality. Analyzing the socially mediated process of writing in a university summer pre-enrollment program designed for first-generation, low-income students and students of color, we consider how the feedback relation supported various forms of political-ethical becoming. Using participatory design and ethnographic methodologies, we closely analyze three student cases as contextualized in a broader set of 40 student portfolios (student writing, written feedback, and interviews). In each of our cases, we identify particular aspects of feedback that are attuned to the political and ethical. These include: encouraging connections between social thought and action; cultivating complex political analysis and semantic sharpening; and modeling generosity. We find that students described new relationships with the act of writing as tied to repairing or deepening relationships with family members and cultural practices. Alongside the pedagogical implications woven throughout, we theorize written feedback on student writing as a relation that can mediate other relationships in ways that support everyday enactments of social transformation, what we conceptualize as “political-ethical becoming.”