Toward an understanding of doctoral students’ feedback literacy in academic publishing: an ecological perspective

Despite the bulk of the higher education literature on student feedback literacy in instructional contexts, few studies have explored doctoral students’ feedback literacy in academic publishing. Given that academic publishing is an important means by which doctoral students enter academia, how they engage with reviewer feedback to successfully publish their manuscripts requires further investigation. From an ecological perspective, this case study examined the ecological affordances perceived by doctoral students in their engagement with reviewer feedback and the enactment of their feedback literacies in relation to the perceived affordances. Multiple sources of data were collected from two Chinese doctoral students with varying publishing experiences, including three semi-structured interviews with each student, students’ reflective journals, manuscript drafts, response letters to reviewers, and written reviewer feedback. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that students perceived affordances from past experiences and the immediate context across three layers: textual-rhetorical, socio-disciplinary, and interpersonal. They manifested and enacted their feedback literacy by using these perceived affordances in different patterns. Specifically, one participant relied heavily on past reviewing and publishing experiences and skillfully orchestrated contextual resources, while the other drew extensively on immediate contextual supports and analogized reviewers to supervisors for emotional regulation. The study contributes theoretically by highlighting the pivotal role of students’ agency in navigating the interrelations between feedback encounters and multi-layered ecological factors. It also offers pedagogical implications for fostering doctoral students’ feedback literacies in academic publishing, emphasizing the need to cultivate nuanced understandings of disciplinary communities and facilitate the transfer of feedback literacy across contexts.