Every so often my inner pedant crawls out the closet where he belongs. Checking through this site I was surprised to see that the last time he slither out was back in 2003, when I took issue with people using the useful word “disinterested” to mean the same thing as “uninterested”.
My current irritation is the way that the word “feedback” is currently used to mean asking people what they think of your performance or an activity they have undertaken. Now I know that objecting to this usage is being ultra pedantic, since if you do a google on “feedback” and ask for a definition one of the ones you get is:
“The return of information about the result of a process or activity; an evaluative response: asked the students for feedback on the new curriculum.”
But, never-the-less, I can’t help feeling that this usage is pretty wooly and gives an unfounded authority and precision to a process that isn’t. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more accurate to say, “We asked students about what they thought of the new curriculum.” or “I took some students aside and asked them some questions to find out how much they had understood of my lecture”?
What might be more productive is if we were to think more about and practice, what Donald Schon called “backtalk”:
“One form of judgment in which I’m particularly interested is the kind that I call backtalk, where you discover something totally unexpected-‘Wow, what was that?’ or ‘I don’t understand this,’ or ‘This is different from what I thought it would be-but how interesting!’ Backtalk can happen when the designer is interacting with the design medium. In this kind of conversation, we see judgments like, ‘This is clunky; that is not,’ or ‘That does not look right to me,’ or just ‘This doesn’t work.’ The designer’s response may be ‘This is really puzzling,’ or ‘This outcome isn’t what I expected-maybe there is something interesting going on here.'”
The problem I see with our current usage of the term “feedback” is that it’s focus is too narrow and too concerned with confirming prior assumptions. Backtalk, in contrast, is about surprises and discontinuities, the kind of things that enable us to see what we are doing with fresh eyes, and may give us clues to make the work work better, whether we’re designers, teachers or anyone else making stuff happen in the world.