Feedback Loops: Assembling Student Editors, Stories, and Devices for Multimodal Peer Feedback
Ten year old Alistair (all names are pseudonyms) has himself comfortably tucked away under a large table in his fifth grade classroom. With his iPad propped beside him, angled to bring his head and upper body into view, he is ready to begin. He presses record, checks for the flashing red light and, once confident that the iPad is recording, shares his thoughts for his editing partner, Mercedes:Okay. Mercedes, my feedback is: I liked it when you wrote, "I rolled off my bed. I smashed my face on the ground. My hair was as tangled like it was crazy hair day." That was a good simile. And to strengthen your story, your story beginning, I'd probably tell you: Can you add some more details of Olivia? 'Cause I wanna know more about the character, Olivia, the best friend. And uh I'm confused. What is the main character here? What is the main character's name? I just wanna know that. But your story beginning is really nice. Not bad. It's good it's really good! Yeah it's good!While his use of English may have been nonstandard, Alistair, who had been living in Canada for a few years after emigrating with his family from a war torn region of central Africa, was a confident storyteller. Keen to learn more about writing stories that were, as he put it, "entertaining," he had learned much from his teacher about elements of strong narrative writing. When his teacher introduced peer feedback to the class, Alistair smoothly stepped into the role of peer editor.In this article, we examine the writer's workshop in Alistair's classroom at a point when his teacher had introduced multimodal recording devices to the process of peer feedback. Students in this study worked in teacher assigned editorial pairs to assist each other in the draft revise cycle by recording feedback to their writing partner on iPads and iPods. As researchers with an interest in language and literacy development in intermediatelevel classrooms, we explore the writing and editing spaces that unfolded for students in a fifth grade classroom as they played with the practice of providing multimodal feedback in assemblages their teacher called "feedback loops." Using a socio material lens for interpretation, we examine the practices and perspectives of student editors.We were particularly interested in answering these questions: Does introducing a multimodal recording device, such as an iPad or iPod, to the peer feedback loop simply add a digital overlay to an established classroom routine, or does it actually create new conditions of possibility for young writers? What kinds of insights are generated by students as they work within their assigned feedback loops? What insights are provided by students who formed their own feedback loops, outside of those sanctioned by their teacher?Peer feedback and Multimodal recording devicesPeer feedbackClassroom routines for literacy instruction such as the writer's workshop have long been viewed as a rich basis for literacy instruction in elementary schools (Atwell, 1987; Woodward, Harste, Burke, 1984) Similarly, peer feedback in the writer's workshop has also been seen as a productive means of scaffolding student writing development (e.g. Calkins, 1983) However, peer feedback is recognized as a practice that requires careful implementation. Writing for peer audiences involves a certain amount of risk for pre adolescent writers. Peers may not receive the work in the ways intended by the author, especially when young authors express deep emotion in their writing (Lenters, 2012) Entrenched social divisions among classmates may be exacerbated when the responses of peer editors are hurtful or demeaning (Lensmire, 1994) Elbow (1987) observes that audiences can be "powerfully inhibiting,"so much so, in certain cases, that awareness of them as we write blocks writing altogether. There are certain people who always make us feel dumb when we try to speak to them: we can't find words or thoughts.