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This thesis characterizes the feedback between the instructor and student teams engaged in a Virtual Bioreactor (VBioR) Laboratory Project. The project allows senior-level chemical, biological, and environmental engineering students to apply their developing knowledge and skills in an industrially situated process optimization project. Feedback is an important tool for instructors to use to scaffold student learning, especially in the context of an ill-structured project. An ethnographic approach is taken for data collection; audio recordings and field notes are taken throughout the duration of the project. The characterization of feedback uses an episodes framework for discourse analysis to consider similarities and differences. Using this framework, thematic codes have been developed through a semi-emergent process to describe the content of Design Memo Meetings (DMMs) between an instructor and student teams. Student work products, post-DMM surveys, and post-project interviews are also considered as data sources for this research. The results of this research show that instructor feedback in this project is adaptable, conforming to the status of the student team at the beginning of the DMM. This adaptability is highlighted by differences in DMM themes that are supported by differences in the Design Strategy Memos that student teams bring to the meeting. Student perceptions of the DMM feedback are also presented. / Graduation date: 2013

In first-year composition courses, there are three aspects of teaching that are researched well so far: disclosure of trauma in student writing, instructor feedback, and emotional labor. The disclosure of trauma is almost completely unavoidable in first-year composition. We encounter an issue with instructor feedback; how do we provide feedback to student writing, like grammar and mechanics, when the student has disclosed trauma in the writing? Additionally, we can build off this with emotional labor, which already occurs consistently in teaching but is heightened in this instance. When providing feedback to a student who has disclosed trauma, this can be emotionally taxing on the instructor, as they may have to hide emotions regarding feedback to disclosure. How can the instructor manage their emotional labor in this instance – or how can instructors provide feedback to student disclosure of trauma in a manner that both prioritizes the student and instructor’s mental health?