Teachers’ Feedback and Educational Self
of Institutionalized Youngsters:
A Possible Dialog?
Dulce Martins and Carolina Carvalho
Introduction
In a society where schools are part of the daily experiences of most of its children,
teachers have a strong influence on personal, social, and vocational development of
their students. According to the educational literature (e.g., Black & Wiliam, 1998;
Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2002; Hattie, 2003, 2009), teachers’ feed-
back is an important issue to promote learning and interaction between teachers and
students. Teachers’ feedback is also described as a source of information that allows
individuals to see themselves while students in connection with school activities.
This feedback, always more than just words, contributes to the internalization of
meanings about I-Other relationship (Bakhtin, 1986) in the education context (Ian-
naccone, Marsico & Tateo, 2013). Recent research (e.g., Carvalho, Santos, Conboy,
& Martins, 2014; Martins & Carvalho, 2014; Martins, 2015) revealed students voices
about the teachers’ feedback and it can be considered a mediator in the self-regulation
of academic learning and in the promotion of social and vocational skills. Also to
Iannaccone et al. (2013), the internal position (me-as-a-student) is still in formation
and the result of this is that the “adolescent has to negotiate between its own image
of self to be, the feedback received outside the school and the feedback received by
the adults [and peers] in the classroom or during school-family meetings” (p. 223) or
at home or even in social relationships with peers, after this meetings or classes. But,
what institutionalized students said about teachers’ feedback? And how this feed-
back mediated educational self? Concretely, the research done by Martins (2015) with
institutionalized youngsters reveal internal and external positions interlaced. Accord-
D. Martins (B ) · C. Carvalho
Instituto de Educação da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: dulce.sofia.martins@iscte-iul.pt; dulcemartins@campus.ul.pt
C. Carvalho
e-mail: cfcarvalho@ie.ulisboa.pt
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
G. Marsico and L. Tateo (eds.), The Emergence of Self in Educational Contexts,
Cultural Psychology of Education 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98602-9_6
93