Negative Emotions as Barriers to Meaningful Feedback:

Description

Connecting Legal Education - The Festival
Liberty Building, School of Law, University of Leeds

Negative Emotions as Barriers to Meaningful Feedback: A Case Study of Non-Embedded Legal Writing Support

The link between emotion and learning experiences, particularly assessment and feedback, lacks sufficient attention in Higher Education. The highly emotive discipline of Law is fertile ground to explore this interaction between emotion and feedback. This paper focuses on the ways in which negative emotions can act as barriers to feedback encounters and dialogue. It does so by outlining the findings from a small-scale qualitative project that examined the impact of a non-embedded writing support initiative implemented in the Law Department at the University of Manchester. We reflect on how non-embedded legal writing support can mitigate the impact of negative emotions in feedback processes and we invite the audience to begin to think creatively about how to recognise and account for the impact of emotion on feedback dialogue and, perhaps more broadly, students’ learning experiences.

Our core findings reveal that negative emotion inhibits feedback dialogue at three key junctures: accessing written feedback; accessing feedback dialogue; and the quality of feedback dialogue. In presenting this typology, we wish to initiate discussions with the audience about the ways in which emotions (‘positive’ and ‘negative’; staff and students) are interacting with feedback and assessment design across legal education.

Period	20 Jun 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Leeds, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National