Feedback in Practice

This research project advances theoretical and applied knowledge about communication practices in professional training in high-stake, high-risk professions, focusing on the rescue services.

The overarching objective of FEEDBACK IN PRACTICE (FiP) is to specify how the design of instructors’ feedback is consequential for the trainees’ understanding and acceptance of indicated problems and eventual implementation of the feedback content in subsequent training.

More specifically, the project sets out to: a) identify and account for actual instances where instructors and trainees manifestly engage in and accomplish feedback processes on practical training; b) determine the relevance of the sensorial dimension of the exercises in relation to their assessable aspects; and c) outline a roadmap for navigating actual instances of feedback in interaction.

The data will include approximately 80 hours of already initiated videographic documentation of naturally occurring firefighters’ training and subsequent debriefing sessions in Switzerland and Sweden.

The recordings will be transcribed and analyzed using a multimodal, social interactional, comparative and interdisciplinary approach to identify and explain critical instances of feedback during practical training.

The project is conceptualized as part of an innovative collaboration with three international and interdisciplinary research projects on feedback in other domains of professional training.

The research will break new grounds regarding how feedback, as a generative practice for carrying out pedagogical tasks, is normatively ordered and relies on vernacular linguistic, embodied and sensorial resources.

By developing a communication model in cooperation with associated experts, the project will contribute to the advancement of the existing curriculum in high-risk practical training, which will be instrumental for securing and improving skills in exigent and essential professions such at the rescue services.