A diffractive reading of dialogical feedback through the political ethics of care

With regard to improving higher education feedback practices, there is an increasing interest in using the efficacy of dialogue rather than the more traditional unidirectional approaches. We build on this impetus by considering how the ethics of care can be used to analyse the dialogical aspects of feedback. By diffractively reading insights of Boud and Molloy [2013a. “What is the Problem with Feedback?” In Feedback in Higher and Professional Education: Understanding it and Doing it Well, edited by D. Boud, and E. Molloy, 1–10. London: Routledge; Boud, D., and E. Molloy. 2013b. “Rethinking Models of Feedback for Learning: The Challenge of Design.” Assessment &; Evaluation in Higher Education 38 (6): 698–712] on dialogic feedback through the moral elements of care ethics, this paper proposes a novel way of discerning the extent to which the dialogical giving and receiving of feedback contributes to learning. To illustrate this, we draw on experiences from an Emerging Technologies professional development course for higher educators. We examine our own dialogical interactions of giving and receiving feedback using the moral elements of care ethics – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust, to provide a concrete example of how the ethics of care can be used productively for evaluating feedback practices.     

South African universities and human development: Towards a theorisation and operationalisation of professional capabilities for poverty reduction

This paper reports on a research project investigating the role of universities in South Africa in contributing to poverty reduction through the quality of their professional education programmes. The focus here is on theorising and the early operationalisation of multi-layered, multi-dimensional transformation based on ideas from Amartya Sen's capability approach. Key features of a professionalism oriented to public service, which in South Africa must mean the needs and lives of the poor, are outlined. These features include: the demand from justice; the expansion of the comprehensive capabilities both of the poor and professional capability formation to be able to act in ‘pro-poor’ ways; and, praxis pedagogies which shape this connected process. This theorisation is then tentatively operationalised in a process of selecting transformation dimensions.