Creative Feedback: a Manifesto for Social Learning

Arguably one of the most important activities of a university is to provide environments where students develop the wide variety of social and intellectual skills necessary for giving and receiving feedback. We are not talking here about the kinds of activity typically associated with the term “feedback” such as that which occurs through individual course evaluation questionnaires or more universal systems such as the National Student Survey, but the profoundly creative and human act of giving and receiving feedback in order validate, challenge and inspire. So as to emphasise we are talking about this kind of feedback, we coin the term “creative feedback” to distinguish it from the pre-conceived rather dreary compliance-inflected notions of feedback and set out in this paper to characterise its qualities. In order to ground and motivate our definition and use of “creative feedback” we take a historical look at the two concepts of creativity/creative and feedback. Our intention is to use this rich history to motivate both the choice two words, and the reason to bring them together. In doing so we wish to emphasise the characteristics of an educational philosophy underpinned by social interaction. By describing those qualities necessary to characterise creative feedback this paper sets out an educational philosophy for how schools, communities and universities could develop their learning environments. What we present here serves not only as a manifesto for designing learning environments generally but as a driver for designing technologies to support online social learning. Technology not only provides us with new opportunities to support such learning but also to investigate and evidence the way in which we learn and the most effective learning environments.