Summative Presentation

Presentation Playback to course colleagues in December 2025

This reflexive bibliography provides an account of how different bodies of scholarship shaped, supported or sat alongside this Action Research Project. Some texts are cited directly in Blogs 1-7 because they informed analysis, interpretation or methodological decision-making. Others were engaged with more loosely during reading, sense-making, and reflection and influenced the project without being explicitly mobilised in the written outputs. Making this distinction visible allows for a more honest account of how knowledge was assembled across the enquiry.

Category 1: Conceptual and theoretical architecture

These texts provided conceptual language for thinking about relationality and anti-positivist epistemology. They functioned less as connective metaphors that helped me understand knowledge as dynamic and relational rather than fixed or procedural. In particular, Deleuze and Guattari’s work shaped how I conceptualised emergence, becoming and multiplicity across the project, and how I came to understand collegial feedback and partnership as relational and emergent infrastructures.

Category 2: Methodology and analytic practice

This literature directly informed how I conducted, justified, and reflected on qualitative analysis, reflexivity, ethics and interpretation. Braun and Clarke, Alvesson, Banks, and McNiff shaped how I understood rigour as reflexive responsibility, transparency and analytic judgement. These texts were central to articulating how meaning was constructed through reflexive thematic analysis. They also supported my positioning as an insider-researcher and helped me navigate the ethical and interpretive responsibilities that accompanied that role.

Category 3: Practice-facing and contextual lenses

These texts helped me interpret participants’ accounts in relation to organisational life, professional dialogue, psychological safety and relational labour. Applied deductively to the research, they clarified how interpersonal risk and psychological safety are produced through interaction rather than assumed as baseline conditions. They also provided language for emotional and affective labour that resonated strongly with participants’ descriptions of feedback as care work. Leadership and professional development literature helped situate the findings within broader conversations about learning, collaboration, and organisational culture, without prescribing solutions.

Bibliography audit and categorisation

A. Explicitly cited in Posts 1–7

Conceptual and theoretical architecture

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jackson, A.Y. and Mazzei, L.A. (2012) Thinking with theory in qualitative research. London: Routledge.

Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Methodology and analytic practice

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2021) Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide. London: SAGE.

Alvesson, M. (2011) Interpreting Interviews. London: SAGE.

Banks, S. (2016) ‘Everyday ethics in professional life’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 10(1), pp. 35–52.

McNiff, J. (2002) Action Research for Professional Development. London: Routledge.

Irvine, A., Drew, P. and Sainsbury, R. (2013) ‘Clarification and responsiveness in semi-structured interviews’, Qualitative Research, 13(1), pp. 87–106.

Practice-facing and contextual lenses

Akama, Y. (2015) ‘Being awake to Ma : designing in between-ness as a way of becoming with’, CoDesign, 11(3–4), pp. 262–274. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081243.

Akama, Y. (2015) ‘Being awake to relational work’, in Proceedings of C&T 2015. New York: ACM.

Carson, M. (2006) ‘Saying it like it isn’t: The pros and cons of 360-degree feedback’, Business Horizons, 49(5), pp. 395–402. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2006.01.004.

Edmondson, A.C. (2018) Psychological Safety in Health Care and Education Organizations: A Comparative Perspective. Harvard Business School Working Paper.

Edmondson, A.C. et al. (2016) ‘Understanding psychological safety’, Research in Human Development, 13(1), pp. 65–83.

García, E.C. (2024) ‘Peer feedback for teaching professional development’, Cogent Education, 11(1).

Ribosa et al. (2024) ‘Teachers’ closeness of professional relationship’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 140.

Hutchins, G. and Storm, L. (2019) Regenerative Leadership. WordsWorth Publishing.

B. Engaged with but not explicitly cited in Posts 1–7

Methodology, reflexivity and citation

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.

Ellis, C.S. and Bochner, A.P. (2006) ‘Analyzing analytic autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), pp. 429–449.

Arnold, L. and Norton, L. (2021) ‘Problematising pedagogical action research’, Educational Action Research, 29(2), pp. 328–345.

Bowen, G.A. (2009) ‘Document analysis as a qualitative research method’, Qualitative Research Journal, 9(2), pp. 27–40.

Harwood, N. (2009) ‘Functions of citations’, Journal of Pragmatics, 41(3), pp. 497–518.

Mott, C. and Cockayne, D. (2017) ‘Citation matters’, Gender, Place & Culture, 24(7), pp. 954–973.

Peer learning, feedback and professional relationships

van Blankenstein et al. (2025) ‘Ask your peer!’, Educational Research and Evaluation, 30(1–2), pp. 36–57.

Gray, J., Kruse, S. and Tarter, C.J. (2016) ‘Collegial trust and learning communities’, EMAL, 44(6), pp. 875–891.

Darling-Hammond, L. et al. (2017) Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute.

Torres-Cajas, M. et al. (2021) ‘Teacher Coassessment Process in Higher Education’, Atenea (Concepción), 26(523), pp. 347–364. Available at: https://doi.org/10.29393/AtAt523-425MTTC40425.

Parallel to theme generation, there’s a deductive turn in methodology, placing the inductively generated themes back into dialogue with existing scholarship. This is not an attempt to apply theory to the data in a confirmatory sense, but to use theory as a way of sharpening interpretation, building pragmatic scaffolding, and perhaps expanding or uncovering new or even more nuanced ways of interpreting the data.

The reflexive thematic analysis process elucidates that participants respond less to feedback as a discrete activity and more to the relational conditions within which feedback takes place. Collegial feedback functions as an expression of relational infrastructure rather than a standalone technique. Where partnerships are anchored in meaningful, growth-oriented work, feedback is experienced as specific, timely and actionable. Where such relational anchoring is absent, feedback risks becoming perfunctory or emotionally burdensome.

Treating collegial feedback as relational labour rather than as a technical intervention reframes what support is needed. It helps explain why imposed or generic feedback initiatives often feel misaligned, while voluntary, purpose-driven partnerships are more likely to endure. Sustained learning behaviours depend on individuals’ willingness to engage in interpersonal risk in contexts they experience as meaningful and safe (Edmondson, 1999; 2018). In this framing, feedback is not the starting point but the outcome of relationships that make vulnerability, candour and mutual investment possible.

Edmondson’s work on psychological safety reframes safety as a dynamic feature of organisational culture, but as something that “is shaped through ongoing interpersonal interactions” (Edmondson, 2018). This perspective resonates strongly with participants’ accounts, where hesitancy around feedback is not an unwillingness for this type of exchange, but a concern about its personal relevance and relational alignment that could lead to resentment. Safety is experienced as relational, sustained through reciprocity, follow-up and shared context rather than assumed as a starting condition.

Emotional and affective labour explain why these relational conditions carry such weight. Akama’s work on relational and participatory practice highlights how “relational and affective labour often remains invisible, even though it is central to sustaining participatory and collaborative practices” (Akama, 2015). Participants’ accounts depict how this labour can go unvalidated. At programme or institutional levels, informal collegial feedback or partnerships are not necessarily recognised as “job work”, echoing Akama’s argument that such labour is routinely unacknowledged.

Feedback, in this sense, is not simply informational exchange but a form of care work that requires recognition and reciprocity in order to remain viable. As Akama argues, “designing with others involves ethical responsibility for how relationships are formed, maintained, and sustained” (2015). Alongside the themes, collegial feedback emerges as an ethically charged relational practice rather than a neutral professional skill.

Here are the “finalised” themes:

Bibliography

Akama, Y. (2015a) Invisible designing: Emotional and affective labour in relational participatory practices. In: DiSalvo, C., Light, A., Hirsch, T., Le Dantec, C.A., Goodman, E. and Hill, K. (eds.) Participatory design for learning: Perspectives from practice. New York: Routledge, pp. 57–72.

Akama, Y. (2015b) ‘Being awake to relational work: Designing for relationality in participatory practice’. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2015). New York: ACM, pp. 1–10.

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2021) Thematic analysis: A practical guide. London: SAGE

Edmondson, A.C. (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383.

Edmondson, A.C. (2018) Psychological safety in health care and education organizations: A comparative perspective. Harvard Business School Working Paper.

Jackson, A.Y. and Mazzei, L.A. (2012) Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London: Routledge.

Reflexive work is being entangled with the data, not just entangling the data. Analysis functioned less as extraction and more as a process of thinking with the data, where meaning developed through relationships between elements rather than from any single account (see process image of thematic analysis on Miro below). As Jackson and Mazzei (2012) argue, qualitative analysis works by generating connections that produce new ways of thinking, rather than extracting findings from data.

Emerging from analysis, collegial feedback was not the most generative focus. What consistently surfaced instead was collegial partnership. The question that asserted itself was not “How can we improve peer feedback?” but “What conditions support positive and sustainable collegial partnerships?” Participants described feedback as viable when embedded in relationships characterised by trust, shared purpose, mutual respect, and psychological safety. These partnerships tended to form organically rather than through formal allocation, and this relational grounding appeared central to sustainability.

I noticed that the candidate themes sat differently to parts of the peer feedback literature. Much existing research frames peer feedback through teaching development and structured practices such as reciprocal peer observation or co-assessment, suggesting that closeness can emerge through participation (e.g. García, 2024; Ribosa et al., 2024). My findings point to a different analytic emphasis. In this project, collegial partnerships tended to form only where a degree of trust, mutual respect, and shared purpose already existed. These conditions functioned as entry points rather than outcomes of collaboration. Framing collegial partnership solely through teaching development risks overlooking how academics experience professional growth across a wider range of aspirations and identities. Recognising this clarified my contribution as identifying the relational conditions that make collegial partnership possible, rather than evaluating learning outcomes once feedback is already underway.

Feedback is indeed messy. It’s an entanglement of emotional, structural, aspirational, and relational dimensions. Attempting to isolate these nodes is ultimately counterproductive. Instead, thematic storytelling allowed for subjective grappling and repositioning of these multiplicities into provisional coherence. What is challenging is creating a distinct focus for each theme but not the contextual complexity that’s shared between the themes.

For example, feedback appears to require some structure in order to be sustained, yet too much structure risks turning it into another administrative task. Conversely, feedback that is too informal often lacks time, space, or symbolic permission to be valued and supported strategically by the institution. Sitting with these tensions reinforced the importance of resisting premature analytic closure and instead working carefully with complexity as it appeared, echoing Law’s argument that social research often sanitises mess in ways that obscure how phenomena actually operate (Law, 2004). As Braun and Clarke emphasise, qualitative rigour in reflexive thematic analysis lies not in analytic closure, but in transparent, well-justified interpretive decisions made in relation to context, purpose, and consequence (Braun and Clarke, 2021).

Throughout this phase, I resisted the urge to tidy things up or to follow the path of least resistance by grouping data according to surface-level similarities alone. Some contradictions remained unresolved, and some themes felt deliberately unfinished. Rather than treating this as analytic weakness, as I might have prior to this project, I now understand it as part of the work. Indulging in multiplicity is permitted.

Bibliography

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2021) Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide. London: SAGE.

García, E.C. (2024) ‘Peer feedback for teaching professional development: conditions for it to take effect’, Cogent Education, 11(1), p. 2391577.
https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2024.2391577

Jackson, A.Y. and Mazzei, L.A. (2012) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. London: Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203148037

Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Ribosa, J. et al. (2024) ‘Teachers’ closeness of professional relationship and its role in learning perception after reciprocal peer observation’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 140, p. 104469.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2024.104469

In the initial action phase, I understood the intervention primarily as a test of a non-evaluative peer feedback practice. The working assumption was that enabling colleagues to author their own feedback questions would increase agency in the feedback exchange and foster positive and psychologically safe engagement. From a design-oriented perspective, I hypothesised that a feedback toolkit might be a useful artefact to scaffold future peer feedback processes, helping participants reflect strategically on their feedback questions and feel comfortable providing constructive responses.

My intention was to provide a prototype toolkit based on theory to participants from the outset in order to test this hypothesis. However, I found it difficult to translate theory into a practical and novel feedback toolkit, and action stalled as I treated the absence of a toolkit as a barrier to engaging participants. In a revelatory reflective journaling moment, I realised that the toolkit was not a methodological necessity. While this hypothesis-driven, design-oriented approach initially provided a familiar way into the project, it also narrowed my understanding of what to prioritise at that stage. In hindsight, the toolkit functioned less as a required output and more as a conceptual anchor that rooted me in familiar design research processes at the outset that was an impediment. This shift in understanding aligns with Alvesson’s account of reflexivity as operating through “a framework that stimulates an interplay between producing interpretations and challenging them” (Alvesson, 2003). Letting go of this assumption enabled the project to move forward.

I initiated feedback exchanges by circulating my own questions to colleagues (below) [1], alongside repeated invitations at team meetings. Although these invitations were received positively in conversation, participation remained limited. This lack of uptake became analytically significant; I treated non-participation as part of qualitative data, possible signaling latent conditions shaping collegial engagement. Perhaps workload pressures, relational tensions or negative associations with feedback were factors. Action research traditions treat resistance, hesitation and silence as meaningful expressions of context rather than deficits to be corrected (Reason & Bradbury, 2008).

The decisive moment in reframing the enquiry occurred during interviews (see semi-structured interview script below) with participants who were already in active collegial partnerships. These participants described the feedback activity as valuable because it was embedded in collaborative relationships characterised by trust, shared interest and mutual support [2][3]. Their accounts challenged my earlier assumption that generalised peer feedback – if sufficiently well designed – would be a meaningful step forward regardless of relational context. As Alvesson (2012) suggests, interviewees may “carve out a space of their own”, resisting the interviewer’s intentions and interpretive frames. In this case, that resistance acted against my own inertia, prompting a shift in how I understood the work: collegial feedback was not simply a practice to be introduced, but something relationally embedded, most effective when anchored in specific collaborations rather than abstract or performative collegiality.

By settling into this reflexive approach, meaning from the data was not something extracted, but as something synthesised through multiplicities of interaction, positionality and interpretive judgement. This understanding resonates with Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming rather than fixed representation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Consistent with McNiff’s (2002) conception of action research as relational and participatory, the action phase did not validate a specific feedback mechanism, but led to a reframing of the enquiry itself to: What are the conditions for positive and sustainable collegial feedback?

Footnotes

[1] See Appendix for colleague feedback responses to my feedback questions

[2] See Appendix for Participant written reflections on their collegial feedback exchanges. It also contains their feedback questions. On their own accord, they wrote reflections prior to their semi-structured interview.

[3] See Appendix for redacted coding document I developed from the interview transcripts.

Bibliography

Alvesson, M. (2003) ‘Beyond neopositivists, romantics, and localists: A reflexive approach to interviews in organizational research’, Academy of Management Review, 28(1), pp. 13–33.

Alvesson, M. (2012) ‘Views on interviews: A sceptical review’, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 7(2), pp. 127–144.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McNiff, J. (2002) Action research for professional development: Concise advice for new action researchers. Bournemouth: Hyde Publications.

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds.) (2008) The SAGE handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. 2nd edn. London: SAGE.

The Ethical Action Plan (below) was written before the project had properly begun, when I assumed the enquiry would centre on the design and testing of a feedback toolkit. As the project developed inductively, the focus shifted, but the plan remained a useful reference point for thinking through ethical responsibilities as they emerged in practice.

In practice, I did not encounter significant ethical issues during participant recruitment or interviews. Participants engaged willingly and the Participant Information Sheet and Consent Form (below) were designed to foreground voluntary participation, withdrawal and the non-evaluative nature of the project. However, as data generation progressed, my primary ethical concern shifted from participation and towards analysis and representation. Ethics is an ongoing, deliberative process rather than a one-off procedural requirement (British Educational Research Association, 2024). My shift aligns with Banks’ (2016) account of “everyday ethics”, in which ethical judgement is understood as emerging through practice rather than bounded by formal approval processes.

I was cognisant of existing and historical collegial tensions and other frustrations about the course due to my relation with the course. It was a possibility that these accounts or emotions might surface or impact relations to feedback, and I was conscious of my responsibility to provide appropriate duty of care in how participants’ accounts were analysed and reported. As BERA (2024) note, “dual roles may also introduce explicit tensions in areas such as confidentiality”, particularly where researchers are reflecting on their own professional practice in relation to colleagues. Braun & Clarke (2021) similarly refer to this as being an “insider researcher”. Participants sometimes alluded to sensitive experiences, such as difficulties in communication with close collaborators or feelings of resignation about the potential for feedback to lead to change due to workplace baggage. While these insights were important analytically, I felt a responsibility to ensure that they informed thematic analysis without being disseminated in ways that could create drama, expose individuals or have unintended relational consequences.

A further ethical consideration emerged in relation to the semi-structured interview schedule. An early interview prompted a reframing of the project from a focus on feedback tools to a deeper interest in the conditions required to support collegial partnerships. Despite this shift, I chose to maintain consistency in the interview questions across participants. This decision was both methodological and ethical, helping to avoid leading participants and strengthening the credibility of the thematic patterns, which emerged without being explicitly prompted.

Finally, I was torn over how much of myself to bring into interviews. Unlike previous research contexts, complete neutrality felt artificial. I occasionally shared my own experiences or reflections when they felt directly relevant, while remaining mindful of not steering participants’ accounts. In light of the scholarly positions, it is part of the ethical complexity of conducting research within one’s own professional community, which reflected the situated and relational nature of ethical practice described by Banks (2016).

Bibliography

Banks, S. (2016) ‘Everyday ethics in professional life: Social work as ethics work’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 10(1), pp. 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2015.1126623

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2021) Thematic analysis: A practical guide. London: SAGE.

British Educational Research Association (BERA) (2024) Ethical guidelines for educational research. 5th edn. London: BERA.

As the project developed, my engagement with theory became less about identifying frameworks to apply to collegial feedback practices and more about clarifying my epistemological position. In effect, how knowledge is understood, produced and justified within reflexive qualitative research. One theoretical influence was rhizomatic thinking.

My tutor suggested I look at Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic theory in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and after a quick search, I assumed it was because my project focused on non-hierarchical forms of learning and support. At a rudimentary comprehension (queried via ChatGPT), the rhizome felt like a convenient metaphor for regenerative peer-to-peer feedback – i.e., relational learning, no single point of authority and distributed leadership. In contrast, Deleuze’s description of the “arborescent” model, which is rooted, hierarchical and replicative, can be likened to more traditional line-management feedback structures, which I experienced as siloed and static rather than relational and developmental [1].

My first actual encounter with A Thousand Plateaus felt awful. I struggled with its lack of precision and heavy reliance on metaphor, initially interpreting this as unnecessary abstraction. It was only later, through serendipitous discussion with a friend whose doctoral research happened to focus on Deleuze, that I began to understand rhizomatic thinking less as a descriptive metaphor and more as an epistemological position meant to offer an alternative to positivism.

From this perspective, rhizomatic theory resists the idea that knowledge is objective, stable and fully knowable from a single frame of reference. Instead, knowledge is relational, partial and always in the process of becoming. Understanding emerges through building connections rather than through linear accumulation. This aligns with feminist and post-positivist critiques of objectivity, particularly Donna Haraway’s argument that all knowledge is “situated”, partial and produced from specific embodied positions rather than from a neutral or universal standpoint. Partiality, in this sense, is not a weakness but an epistemic condition (Haraway, 1988). This shift helped me articulate why reflexive qualitative analysis in particular cannot and should not aim for replication or definitive closure in the same way as positivist approaches.

This epistemological stance aligns closely with reflexive thematic analysis, which does not treat themes as inherent properties of data waiting to be uncovered. Rather, themes are constructed through the researcher’s engagement with the data, shaped by their positionality, judgement and interpretive decisions (Braun & Clarke, 2022). In this sense, qualitative analysis can be understood as an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense: a multiplicity of connections between data, researcher, theory and context, brought together to make sense of complexity. Assemblage here is not a fixed structure, but an ongoing process of connection and reconfiguration.

Rhizomatic thinking also offered a way to conceptualise professional and personal growth as relational rather than individual. Becoming, in this sense, is not something that happens in isolation but through connection with others. This has implications for how courses and institutions might support collegial learning: rather than directing development through hierarchical channels, they might focus on creating conditions that enable connections to form and multiply – a rhizome “ceaselessly establishing connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 28) across people, practices and ideas. This relational framing resonates with dialogic traditions in critical pedagogy, particularly conceptions of learning as co-intentional and grounded in dialogue rather than transmission (Freire, 1970). It also aligns with social theories of learning that position learning as participation rather than acquisition. In higher education contexts, Wenger’s concept of communities of practice is useful for understanding learning as emerging through shared practice, mutual engagement and evolving relationships (Wenger, 1998).

Concepts such as deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) further support this way of thinking, not as outcomes of this project but as conceptual possibilities. A shift in how collegial partnerships are recognised or valued by the university, for example, could disrupt or deterritorialse existing relational practices and allow new ones to stabilise or reterritorialise over time.

Finally, I came to understand Deleuze’s use of metaphor not as a pompous intellectual flex, but as a deliberate resistance to positivist epistemology. Metaphor is inexact by design: it requires interpretation, invites multiple readings and resists singular answers. In this way, rhizomatic thinking mirrors reflexive qualitative analysis itself — knowledge is not about being “right”, but about constructing interpretations that are well-reasoned, transparent and open to revision.

Footnotes

[1] This sentiment was also expressed in future participant interviews.

Bibliography

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2022) Thematic Analysis: A practical guide. London: SAGE.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.