Twist and Shape: Feedback Practices within Creative Subject Content of Hairdressing Education

The aim of this study is to explore feedback practices and how such actions of assessment emerge from embodied participation in classroom interactions between teachers and students. Using video recordings of teacher and student interactions in hairdressing education, I look at how feedback practices within creative subject content are produced between the participants as social actions situated in interaction, using conversation analysis. Feedback is contingent upon an embodied moment-to-moment monitoring and collaboration between the teacher and student, and is organized as a trajectory from problem detection through exploration until a final solution is found. Feedback within creative subject content is displayed as a multifarious exploration of embodied as well as materially situated professional knowledge. Overall, the findings show how feedback is mutually produced in a process, making tacit dimensions of hairdressers’ knowing explicit. This allows for improving the quality of the work over time in a trajectory of problem solving phases gradually displaying how to assess creative subject content of the material product worked on.