Feedback is a cyclical process amplifying a signal from e.g., an electric guitar, dependent on the interplay of guitarist, amplifier and distance (Deane-Freeman, 2025). In cybernetics, feedback is also cyclical, enabling control of a system by ‘reinserting into it the results of its past performance’ (Wiener, 1985:6). In most teacher education contexts, however, feedback devolves to a one-way process from a tutor/mentor to a student-teacher. This can occur even when a deliberately relational approach is taken (Heron et al., 2023). The cyclical aspect is often ignored in favour of relaying sufficient information to enable the student-teacher to ‘improve’ their practice in a short period of time. Hence feedback in ITE settings in England, for example, is couched in the simplified status-language of the Initial Teacher Training Early Career Framework (ITTECF: a ‘trainee receiving…mentoring, through structured feedback from expert colleagues…for improving practice’ DfE, 2024, p.7). Rather than cyclical, feedback becomes impartation or just ‘telling.’

Feedback in this context is fraught with issues of agency and power: it downplays discourse and privileges unidirectional ‘training.’ It reflects precisely how the ‘persons’ involved in feedback are understood: the tutor/mentor and the student-teacher are replaced, in the ITTECF, by their doppelgangers of ‘expert colleagues’ and ‘trainees’ respectively (Pierlejewski et al, 2025). The status hierarchy thus created means that feedback from one doppelganger to the other (‘expert colleague’ to ‘trainee’) cannot help but be unidirectional.

Distinguishing between hierarchy of status and a hierarchy of expertise enables us to reconfigure relationships assumed in feedback conversations (Biesta, 2025). Tutor/mentors function in a range of personal and professional roles as they develop skills and critical dispositions in teachers-to-be. Careful separation of real selves from their ‘doppelgangers’ is necessary to reconfigure the tutor/mentor, student-teacher and the learning-from-feedback in a fuller, more complex relationship to one another.

I argue from the work of Palmer (being both the knower and the known; Palmer, 1983), from Bakhtin (engaging the ‘excess of sight’ that enables the knower/known to see what the ‘other’ cannot; Bakhtin, 1993), the conceptions of self described in Butler (2005), Levinas (1981) and Wirzba (2021), and the discipline of ‘noticing’ in the work of Mason (2011), that there exist varying ways to reconfigure the relationship between the new knowledge provided by feedback, the participant providing the ‘feedback signal’ and the ‘other’ who ‘amplifies’ it. Either person can provide a signal or its amplification. That is the nature of feedback.

This has several practical applications to the reconfigured relationship between tutor/mentors, student-teachers and the learning the feedback conversation generates. These concern the requirement for a shared feedback literacy (Carless & Winstone, 2023), the use of feedback to unearth student criticality, to recast the pedagogy of feedback as fundamentally relational, to welcome excess of sight as a means to deeper learning and to equalise the status-hierarchy to a respectful one so that the experience and expertise of both actors comes into play.

This is a conceptual work, using a variety of methods to help clarify the people and the knowledge involved in a cyclical, critical understanding of feedback. The use of the term ‘reconfiguration’ derives from Biesta’s (2025) work on the limits of perspectival reason, and the need to reconfigure the role of the teacher and the learner with respect to ‘the world’ (here represented by the learning generated in the reconfigured conversation). The use of ‘doppelganger as method’ (Pierlejewski, 2024) has been applied to the English ITE policy context already (Pierlejewski et al., 2025) where it identifies sharp differences between the ITTECF/Department for Education (England) and many teacher educators’ conception of the ‘persons’ involved in teacher education. Here, I extend that understanding to the issue of feedback and how it impacts and constrains the learning generated between the ‘persons’. To enable me to do that, both the configuration of the ‘persons’ with respect to the learning they are to receive, and the nature of the ‘person’ needs to be defined more carefully. The work of Parker Palmer (1983) configures both participants as knower and known, whilst Mikhail Bakhtin’s work (Bakhtin, 1993; King, 2021), engages ‘the architectonic self’ to secure the ontological and relational character of pedagogy, particularly the deployment of ‘excess of sight’ enabling ‘the other’ to see in ‘me’ what I cannot. This allows the learning-from-feedback to take its place as a manipulable entity between student teacher and mentor/lecturer. Conceptions of the self described by Butler (2005), Levinas (1981) and Wirzba (2021) are used to highlight the ‘unwilled susceptibility’ open to interruption and thus open up possibilities of humility and learning by both parties.

I conclude that the dynamics that exist in the ‘reframing’ of teaching students and mentors/lecturers within the English policy documentation as doppelgangers is reflected in the expected processes of feedback within that same documentation. To maximise and deepen the learning-from-feedback, both actors in the feedback conversation learn to see themselves as ‘signal’ and ‘amplifier’, eradicating status-based hierarchies and allowing each other’s ‘excess of sight’ (Bakhtin, 1993) to contribute to and expand the learning. With care, this can offer a number of practical applications to the reconfigured relationship with student teachers (1) to use the feedback conversation to enhance teaching students’ intellectual freedom and criticality in the work they have committed themselves to, and the education system within which they intend to work; (2) to reaffirm relationship at the centre of all pedagogic work by modelling feedback as deriving from both ‘knower and known’; (3) to welcome and prepare for the interruption of another’s excess of sight; and (4) to reframe the language of feedback towards that of a humble noticing that fully respects the other.

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