“Dear Student”: Individualized Written Feedback in Critical Courses

Abstract

Framed as a reflective letter written to the reader, this paper shares my recent thinking about
feedback and assessment in critical courses. “Critical” here is taken to refer to decolonial, antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist perspectives, broadly construed. Courses that work from these
perspectives can be affectively intense for both instructors and students, but they are also
necessary given the social imperatives of the current moment. In considering these courses
further, I reflect on Carolyn Melro’s (2023) doctoral dissertation, which presented empirical
results that seem to question the effectiveness of some pedagogical interventions within
mandatory Indigenous courses. These results lead me to interrogate my own pedagogical
approaches, particularly around feedback and assessment. In the context of critical courses,
feedback and evaluation can be fraught, as instructors walk a careful line between marking
students harshly for disagreeing with them and allowing problematic beliefs to continue
unchallenged. Over the last several years, I have navigated this tension through letter writing. At
the end of student assignments, I write thoughtful responses to their work in the form of
letters. While time consuming and overly intense for some students, many respond positively to
this approach. Though I cannot profess empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of this
approach, I conclude the paper by highlight the inherent uncertainty of teaching and stating my
desire to continue writing letters to the students with whom I work.