Listening, Speaking, Learning: On Verbal Feedback and (Re)Humanizing Assessment

EducationPedagogyDecolonizing educationCPD

21 Feb

Sunset over Queens Park pond, Glasgow, UK

Recently, I listened to a podcast from 2022, Educatalks: Reflective Practice featuring Professor Melaine Coward, a professor of medical education reflect on her career and her commitment to reflective practice. Medical Educatalks is a podcast created by the Developing Medical Educators Group (DMEG) at the Academy of Medical Educators. Toward the end of the conversation, she described her decision to give students verbal feedback on their assessments. The interviewer sounded genuinely surprised, he hadn’t encountered that approach before.

I paused.

Not because it felt novel, but because it felt familiar.

In 2015, while teaching at a University of London institution, I experimented with providing verbal feedback on written assignments. At the time, our digital marking platform enabled tutors to attach audio recordings directly to students’ scripts, so feedback could be posted alongside the written work itself. Students could either listen asynchronously or book a short follow-up slot to discuss it further. I would have their script in front of me as I recorded or spoke with them, talking through strengths, misunderstandings, and next steps. It was dialogic, immediate, and relational, but it was not universally welcomed.

The pushback was swift and couched in procedural language:

How could this be standardized?
How could it be moderated?
Where was the audit trail?

Ironically, the digital system did generate an artefact. The audio file was stored alongside the script. There was a record. And yet the discomfort persisted. What seemed to trouble colleagues was not the absence of documentation, but the presence of voice, with its tone, inflection, and spontaneity. Feedback had become less easily reduced to a static text block. The underlying concern was not simply technical. It was cultural. Feedback, in this framing, was not primarily a pedagogical encounter, it was a compliance mechanism.

Listening to Coward years later, I realized something I could not fully articulate back then: verbal feedback is not merely a technique. It is an epistemological stance. It is a small but meaningful act of (re)humanising assessment.

“But what I found was, so they weren’t reading the comments that I’d spent ages putting on marking there, because I do spend time, it matters that I give good feedback. When I did recorded feedback, I found I had a lot more follow-up from students, because they had had to listen to my feedback, and it was a very clear message of, I really enjoyed this, something for you to think about. I would be quite structured in how I recorded it, so I had notes, so it was formulaic in that sense, but not rehearsed.”

— Professor Melaine Coward

Feedback as encounter, not transmission

Higher education assessment cultures are deeply shaped by what Paulo Freire famously critiqued as the “banking model” of education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In that model, knowledge is deposited; feedback becomes a written correction of deficits; learning is framed as remediation.

Written feedback, of course, can be thoughtful and transformative. But it often operates within systems that prioritize defensibility over dialogue. Comments are calibrated for external examiners. Language becomes cautious. Tone becomes formal and neutralized. The student becomes a case.

Audio feedback, even when delivered asynchronously through a digital platform, subtly shifts that dynamic. Students hear emphasis. They hear encouragement. They hear uncertainty where appropriate. Meaning is shaped not only by what is said, but how it is said.

And when audio is paired with optional follow-up conversation, feedback becomes dialogic in a deeper sense. Students can respond, query, reinterpret.

This resonates with Freire’s insistence on dialogue as the foundation of emancipatory education. It also aligns with bell hooks’ vision of engaged pedagogy in Teaching to Transgress, where teaching and learning are relational acts rather than one-way transmissions.

When we speak with students rather than at them, feedback becomes less about surveillance and more about growth. Voice, literal voice, reintroduces presence into assessment by (re)humanizing it.

The standardization question

The resistance I encountered in 2015 revolved around standardisation. Written comments were seen as stable, recordable, and therefore fair. Audio feedback, even though stored and retrievable, was viewed as potentially variable.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: standardization is not synonymous with justice.

Critical and decolonial scholars have long questioned whose norms assessment criteria encode. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in Decolonising the Mind, reminds us that language and evaluation are never neutral; they are embedded within colonial power structures. Similarly, scholars of antiracist pedagogy argue that assessment practices often privilege dominant linguistic and epistemic norms and performances.

Audio feedback can surface some of this hidden curriculum. It allows educators to unpack what we mean by “criticality” or “coherence” in accessible, responsive ways. It can soften deficit framings by conveying nuance and care. It can make tacit expectations explicit.

For neurodivergent students, multilingual students, or those unfamiliar with disciplinary conventions, hearing feedback, with tone and pacing, can support comprehension in ways that dense written comments may not.

Uniform delivery formats may be easier to audit. But equity sometimes requires responsiveness.

Reflective practice and professional identity

Coward’s framing of verbal feedback emerged from reflective practice, a concept often associated with Donald Schön and his work The Reflective Practitioner. Reflection is not merely about improving technique; it is about interrogating the assumptions that underpin our actions.

Looking back, I can see that my 2015 experience exposed a tension between two logics and a clash of paradigms:

Assessment as pedagogical relationship / Was feedback a compliance mechanism or a pedagogical relationship?
Assessment as quality assurance infrastructure / Was my role to produce defensible documentation or to cultivate understanding?

The digital tool itself was neutral. It could host text or voice. The debate was about what counted as legitimate academic labor and legitimate evidence of fairness.

Reflective practice asks us to interrogate not only how we teach, but why certain practices are normalized while others are treated as suspect.

(Re)humanizing assessment in digital spaces

In my current work, including conversations around decolonizing curricula and rethinking assessment, I often return to a simple question:

What would assessment look like if we centered humanity rather than auditability?

This is not an argument to abandon rigor or documentation. Rather, it is a call to re-balance priorities.

(Re)humanizing assessment might include:

Dialogic feedback conversations alongside written summaries
Audio or video feedback that conveys tone and relational presence
Opportunities for students to respond to feedback
Co-constructed criteria discussions
Assessment designs that value multiple ways of knowing

These moves resonate with broader critical pedagogical commitments: resisting neoliberal metrics, challenging deficit framings, and recognizing students as co-participants in knowledge production. These moves further resonate with critical pedagogy’s insistence on dialogue, with antiracist commitments to challenging hidden norms, and with decolonial calls to unsettle inherited hierarchies of knowledge.

They also align with emerging scholarship on compassionate pedagogy and relational assessment cultures within higher education.

“Hearing someone talk about what you’ve done, the tone and voice to highlight praise, concern, and you can add in a more questioning tone ... They loved it. They loved it because they could hear from my touch. ”

— Professor Melaine Coward

An epiphany, years later: are our systems human enough?

Listening to Coward describe her practice, I felt both affirmed and reflective. The surprise expressed by the podcast interviewer revealed how deeply entrenched written, standardized feedback remains. Yet the fact that such practices continue to surface across disciplines, from medical education to the humanities, suggests a quiet shift. I also felt less concerned with whether verbal feedback is innovative and more interested in what it reveals. What I once framed defensively as “innovative feedback” now feels more clearly like a small act of resistance against depersonalized academic systems.

Even when captured and archived in a digital platform, voice unsettles the fantasy that assessment can be entirely standardised and neutral. It reintroduces tone, care, and relational accountability.

Perhaps the question is not whether audio feedback can be moderated.

Perhaps the more urgent question is whether our assessment cultures allow space for humanity, for dialogue, for nuance, for recognition.

If critical, antiracist, and decolonial pedagogies ask us to re-centre people rather than processes, then even something as simple as attaching a recorded voice note to a script can become a quietly radical act.