What I Received from My Students

Feedback, Learning, and the I–Thou Encounter in Higher Education

When I look back on more than twenty years in higher education, it is not primarily the study plans I remember. Nor is it the committees, course descriptions, assessment systems, reports, or the many reforms that came and went. All of this belonged to the work. All of it was necessary. But that was not where the lifeblood of the work was found.

The best part of working in higher education was the encounter with the students.

I remember the students who entered the classroom with uncertainty, curiosity, resistance, experience, prejudices, questions, and hope. I remember the unfinished texts, the first practice experiences, the hesitant attempts to formulate a research question, and the moments when something suddenly fell into place. I remember the student who did not believe she could write, but who gradually discovered that she had an academic voice. I remember the student who had seen something in the field of practice that she could not let go of, and who needed language in order to understand why it had touched her so deeply.

In such moments, teaching was not merely the transfer of knowledge. It was an encounter.

An encounter with the other who was not yet finished, but who was on the way. An encounter with a human being who was open to learning, not necessarily because everything was easy, but because something was at stake. The student was not merely expected to pass a course. She was slowly becoming a professional.

That was what made the work meaningful.

When Feedback Becomes More Than Feedback

I once gave a lecture titled Feedback or Fast Feed. On the surface, it dealt with something quite practical: how students could receive quicker, richer, and more learning-oriented responses to their work. One of the concerns behind the lecture was that many students did not feel that teachers spent enough time commenting on and responding to their written assignments. This was a pedagogical challenge, especially if teachers themselves believed that they were in fact spending a great deal of time on such feedback.

But when I look back on this material now, I see more clearly that it was really about something deeper. It was not only about techniques for giving feedback. It was about how we meet the student.

Feedback can be given in many ways. It can be a judgment. It can be a correction. It can be a point of control. It can say: This is not good enough. This is missing. This must be corrected. All of this may be true, and sometimes it is necessary.

But feedback can also be an invitation.

It can say: There is something here that you are trying to express. Let us look more closely at it. Here the text moves too quickly. What is missing between these two sentences? Here you use a concept without explaining it. What do you really mean? Here you have an experience from practice. How can it be understood professionally? Here is a claim. What is it based on?

In the lecture, such questions were formulated simply: What did you mean by what you wrote here? How does this relate to your main point or research question? What is your basis for making this claim?

This is more than writing pedagogy. It is a way of meeting the other.

Good feedback does not only say something about the text. It also says something to the student: I take seriously what you are trying to think through. I see that you are on the way. I do not merely want to assess you. I want to help you see more clearly.

The Student as the Other

In Martin Buber’s language, we might say that teaching is always in danger of becoming an I–It relation.

The student can become a number, an assignment, a candidate, a learning outcome, a deviation from the criteria, a grade in a system. The text becomes an object to be measured. The practice report becomes a document to be controlled. The learning contract becomes a form to be completed. In this way, the human being easily disappears behind the product.

But teaching can also become an I–Thou encounter.

In an I–Thou encounter, I do not meet the other as an object for my assessment. I meet a human being who stands before me with her own history, her own uncertainty, her own understanding, and her own possibility of becoming more than she already is. The student is not merely someone who lacks knowledge. The student is someone who is in the process of forming knowledge.

This does not mean that teacher and student occupy the same role. The relation is asymmetrical. The teacher has experience, academic responsibility, and the power to assess. The student is expected to learn, submit work, be tested, and be evaluated. We cannot romanticize this away.

But asymmetry is not the same as one-sidedness.

It is not only the student who receives and the teacher who gives. In the best pedagogical encounters, something happens to both. The student may receive language, direction, academic concepts, and the courage to continue working. The teacher receives something else in return: new questions, new experiences, resistance, wonder, unease, and repeated reminders that the field is never finished.

In meeting my students, I was myself taught.

Not always directly. Not always consciously. But again and again, students taught me something about what social work is, what learning requires, what uncertainty does to people, and how difficult it can be to connect theory with lived practice.

They Did It, but Did Not Know What It Was Called

This became especially clear in practice studies.

In a development project on learning contracts, we used the phrase: They do it when they are in practice, but they do not know what it is called. The point was simple, but important. Students could be out in practice and actually do much of what the profession required. They observed, listened, engaged in conversations, made judgments, wondered, noticed their own reactions, tried to understand service users, collaborated with supervisors, and attempted to find their place in a professional context. But they often lacked the language that made this visible as professional competence.

They did it, but they did not know what it was called.

This is one of the most important pedagogical sentences I know.

For it points to the fact that learning is not only about filling an empty space with theory. The student does not come to education empty-handed. She comes with experiences, a body, language, life history, moral intuitions, uncertainty, relational skills, and the ability to be affected. Some of this is unfinished. Some of it is unclear. Some of it must be corrected. Some of it must be challenged. But much of it is already in motion.

The teacher’s task is therefore not only to add knowledge from the outside. The teacher’s task is also to help the student discover what she is already in the process of doing.

When a student writes about an encounter with a service user, the teacher can ask: What did you actually notice here? What did you do when you chose to remain silent? What made you uncertain? Which professional concept can help you understand this situation? Which ethical value was at stake? What form of knowledge did you use without knowing that you were using it?

In this way, theory does not become a foreign language placed on top of practice. Theory becomes a language that can make practice visible.

The Learning Contract as a Meeting Place

A learning contract can easily become an administrative document. A form. Something that must be filled in to satisfy the institution. In the report on learning contracts, we described how both students and practice supervisors could struggle to understand its purpose, and how for some it could feel like a necessary evil.

But it does not have to be that way.

At its best, the learning contract can become a meeting place between theory and practice, between student and supervisor, between college and field placement, between what the student already knows and what the student still needs to learn.

The simple structure of the learning contract contains a deep pedagogical insight: What am I to learn? How am I to learn it? Why is this important?

These are not merely administrative questions. They are formative questions.

What do I need to know?
What do I need to practise?
What do I need to be challenged on within myself?
What kind of professional am I becoming?

In social work, this is crucial. Professional competence does not consist only of knowledge. It also consists of skills and attitudes. The student must learn laws, theories, methods, and concepts. But she must also practise conversations, relationships, assessments, and collaboration. And she must dare to examine her own reactions, her own prejudices, her own uncertainty, and her own boundaries.

This is why practice is not merely a place where the student applies theory. Practice is a place where theory can acquire a body. It is there the student discovers that ethics is not only something one reads about, but something one stands within. It is there communication is not merely a model, but a conversation with a human being who may not trust you. It is there social justice is not only a principle, but a question of who is seen, who is believed, and who receives help.

Theory and Practice Are Not Enemies

One of the most persistent misunderstandings in professional education is the idea that theory and practice stand opposed to each other.

Students may say: Now I am finally going out into practice, away from theory.
Teachers may say: Students must learn to apply theory in practice.
The field may say: That may sound good at college, but out here reality is different.

All of these statements contain some truth. But they can also conceal a deeper connection. For theory and practice are not two separate worlds. They are two ways of relating to the same reality.

In the report on learning contracts, this was formulated as a question of theory and practice, not theory or practice. Aristotle was brought in to show that practical judgment is about gathering experience over time and developing the ability to act wisely in concrete human situations. Theory is understood not merely as a product found in books, but as an activity, a way of investigating the world.

This has great significance for higher education.

If theory becomes something dead, it is reduced to curriculum. If practice lacks concepts, it easily becomes mere experience. But when theory and practice meet, the student can begin to understand what she is doing. She can see that her actions have assumptions, values, concepts, and consequences. She can discover that practice does not become less real by being illuminated theoretically. On the contrary, it can become more visible.

This was something many students taught me.

They returned from practice with situations that did not fit neatly into models. They had seen doubt, powerlessness, injustice, care, control, silence, trust, betrayal, and small moments of human dignity. They had met people who were not “cases,” but lives. When they spoke about this, theory too was tested. Not discarded, but tested.

And often I, as a teacher, had to think again.

What the Students Gave

It is easy to describe the role of the teacher as a giving role, in the sense that the teacher gives. The teacher gives lectures, readings, supervision, feedback, assignments, assessments, and professional advice. This description is not wrong, but it is insufficient.

For what the students gave in return was far more than gratitude.

They gave questions that broke open my own habits.
They gave practice experiences that made theory more alive.
They gave resistance that forced me to explain better.
They gave uncertainty that reminded me how difficult learning can be.
They gave examples that were not found in the textbooks.
They gave trust when they dared to show what was unfinished.
They gave me the possibility of seeing the field anew, year after year.

This is perhaps one of the most precious things about teaching. One repeats a great deal. One teaches the same themes, reads similar texts, comments on the same kinds of errors, explains again and again what a research question is, why sources must be used, why a claim must be justified, why experience must be reflected upon professionally.

But the students are never the same.

And therefore teaching is never quite the same either. Each student brings a new way into the material. Each group has its own unease, its own humour, its own resistance, its own energy. What was said in one way one year must be said differently the next. Not because the subject is different, but because the encounter is different.

In this way, the students kept the teacher alive as well.

Listening Without Taking Over

In the lecture on feedback, there is one piece of advice that I now find wiser than I perhaps understood at the time: Try to listen without being too interactive, because otherwise you may end up controlling the discussion.

It is a small sentence, but it contains much pedagogical wisdom.

Teachers are often good at speaking. They explain, clarify, correct, expand, nuance, and place the student’s statement within a professional context. All of this can be useful. But the teacher may also end up taking over. The student begins a thought, and the teacher completes it. The student searches for words, and the teacher supplies them too quickly. The student presents an unfinished understanding, and the teacher finishes it before the student has had the chance to work with it herself.

Then feedback can become too efficient.

It can become “fast feed” in the poorer sense: quick nourishment that satisfies for a moment, but does not necessarily help the student think, taste, chew, and digest for herself.

Listening without taking over is difficult. It requires patience. It requires the teacher to tolerate pauses, uncertainty, and detours. It requires that one does not use the student’s question as an opportunity to display one’s own knowledge, but as an opening into the student’s own learning process.

In an I–Thou encounter, the other must be allowed to appear.

This also applies to the student.

The Unfinished Text

Student texts are often unfinished. Sometimes they are messy. Sometimes they lack structure, precision, source use, and academic discussion. Sometimes the language is full of errors. Sometimes the thought is unclear.

But an unfinished text is not only a deficiency. It is also a trace of work. It shows a student who is trying. It shows where the student is. It shows what has not yet been understood, but also what is beginning to become possible.

This is why the way we respond to a student’s text is ethically important.

A harsh comment may be academically correct and still pedagogically poor. A gentle comment may be kind and still academically useless. Good feedback must be true enough to help, and careful enough for the student still to dare to continue working.

This is not indulgence. It is pedagogical precision.

To give feedback is to try to find the point from which the student can move forward. Not where the teacher wishes the student already were. Not where the study plan abstractly places the student. But where this student, with this text, right now, can take a next step.

Sometimes the next step is to understand what a research question is. Sometimes it is to dare to use theory. Sometimes it is to tighten the structure of a text. Sometimes it is to believe that one’s own experiences can have professional significance. Sometimes it is to discover that what one has written does not yet say what one thought it said.

In such moments, feedback becomes a form of practical wisdom.

Mutual Formation

Higher education is often described with large words: knowledge, research, quality, competence, learning outcomes, professional formation. All of this is important. But in the midst of these words, we must not forget that education happens in encounters.

One human being meets another human being around a professional content. A text is presented. An experience is told. A question is asked. An understanding is tested. Something is corrected. Something is opened. Something becomes clearer.

This is formation in practice.

And formation is never entirely one-sided. The one who teaches is also shaped by what he receives. Not in the same way as the student. Not in the same role. But still genuinely.

I think this is what I most strongly carry with me after my years in higher education: The students were not merely recipients of my knowledge. They were co-creators of my understanding of the field. They taught me to see where theory became too abstract, where language became too closed, where practice was more complex than the model, and where important it was to find words that could help without simplifying too much.

They also taught me something about hope.

For there is hope in a student who tries to learn. There is hope in a human being who does not yet know, but who is willing to try. There is hope in the one who dares to submit an unfinished text, enter her first practice placement, meet people in vulnerable situations, return with questions, and allow herself to be challenged.

Not all students were equally motivated. Not all encounters were good. Not everything succeeded. Teaching also involves strain, misunderstanding, administration, frustration, and failure. But when it was at its best, it was one of the most meaningful kinds of work I have known.

Conclusion: The Encounter That Remains

When I think back now, it is not the grades that remain. It is not the forms. It is not the long meetings or the changing reforms.

What remains are the faces, the voices, the questions, and the moments when learning actually happened.

One student suddenly understood the difference between describing and discussing.
Another discovered that her practice experience could be illuminated by theory.
A third found the courage to write in her own professional voice.
A fourth dared to ask the question that many others were also carrying.
A fifth returned from practice having seen something that made her more serious, more humble, more professionally awake.

Such moments cannot be fully planned. They can only be prepared for. We can create good frameworks, give clear assignments, make room for feedback, ask better questions, and try to meet the student where she is. But learning itself always takes place in a living in-between.

It is this in-between that I associate with higher education at its best.

Feedback was never only feedback. The learning contract was never only a form. Practice was never only the application of theory. Teaching was never only communication.

All of these could become places where one human being met another human being in the work of understanding.

And in this encounter I received more than I gave.

I may have given words, concepts, comments, academic demands, and supervision. But the students gave me back what made the work alive: their questions, their experiences, their resistance, their trust, and their slow path into the profession.

That is why the best part of more than twenty years in higher education was not standing in front of the students.

It was meeting them.

The best part of more than twenty years in higher education 

was not standing in front of the students.

It was meeting them.

The essay is based especially on my lecture Feedback or Fast Feed, given at a teachers’ conference in Sweden, Tannumstrand, on 26 November 2008, as well as on my development work on learning contracts as a means of making professional competence visible in practice studies. The text was written in conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT.