Resource Hub

Resources for Students

Welcome! If you’re here, you’re thinking about failure. You’re not alone. Your fellow students, your instructors, innumerable innovators across diverse fields of study – they have all, at some point, struggled through obstacles, missteps, and failures.

Scholarly research (our own, and that of others) shows that failure is a core part of learning, both in higher education and beyond. Some scholars even encourage instructors and students to deliberately build difficulty and struggle into their study practices, as this has been shown to promote deeper learning and longer retention.

Learning from failure sounds like a simple enough concept. In reality, it is complex and messy, and isn’t always accessible to everyone in the same way. We recognize that encouraging students to take chances and embrace learning through failure rings hollow when grades and time to completion matter and when students don’t all have access to the same kinds of resources. As driven as we are to demonstrate that failure is a critical component of the learning process, we are equally focused on advocating for more resources and better support for students both in individual course design and the broader institutional policy. To truly feel empowered to embrace struggle and failure as part of the learning process, students must be adequately supported.

The resources gathered here include a podcast series developed by students for students, a detailed set of examples and case studies documenting the many ways failure and struggle shape histories of invention and innovation, along with editorials and digital content that further explore the benefits and challenges of learning through failure. Also included are links to a variety of support services available to students. We hope that you’ll find something here to help you know that experiencing failure in higher education doesn’t make you a failure; it means you’re learning.

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Resources for Instructors

Instructors play a critical role in how students think about, approach, experience, and make sense of struggle and failure.

Research generated by the FLIP Project shows that students value open and honest discussion about not only the generative potential of failure but also the stakes and potentially long-lasting consequences of failure. Engaging in --and modelling-- critical reflection on these issues goes a long way towards generating a sense of solidarity in classroom settings and normalizing failure as an inevitable part of processes of learning, experimenting, creating, and producing. Here, instructors can explore a selection of resources demonstrative of diverse “failure pedagogies” (and their critical appraisal). They can also draw on resources designed to facilitate failure-attuned course design, and find in-class activities, discussion prompts, example banks, case studies, and digital content to adapt and embed in their own courses.

Instructors may view failure as a valuable pedagogical tool yet experience it (themselves, or on behalf of their students) as an institutional risk. In our research, we note a disconnect between instructor desires to facilitate experiences of generative failure in their teaching and the limitations of institutional policy in supporting such endeavours. Instructors cannot effectively and responsibly work to decouple failure from stigma and advocate for generative failure experiences in higher learning without the support of their institutions. In including resources directed towards administrators of institutions as well instructors and students, the FLIP project aims to facilitate meaningful exchanges that contribute to policy change and program development informed by student experience and by equity-focussed failure pedagogy.

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Resources for Administrators

Institutional change requires administrative vision and dedication to building—and sustaining—equitable student supports.

Postsecondary institutions have increasingly adopted discourses of grit and resiliency that encourage students to take risks in their learning, fail productively, and “bounce back” from failure. However, such discourses ring hollow when the stakes of failure are unevenly felt, and when existing institutional policies do not adequately address inequities or allow for second chances. Institutions cannot responsibly advocate for learning from failure without first critically reckoning with the ways their own systems perpetuate barriers to generative experiences of failure, and without working to develop robust resources and support for all students and instructors.

The resources gathered here include scholarly works (research papers), case studies, editorials, and digital content related to learning from failure in higher education, as well as relevant policies and surrounding discussion. With these resources, institutions will be better equipped to develop student resources and professional development programs, examine the equity and efficacy of existing policies of learning, contextualizes learning and higher education within broader social and cultural value systems, and critically reflect on the way many institutions, including higher education, perpetuate systems of inequality.

It is our hope that these resources spur impetus to engage in institutional self-reflection and contribute to developing an informed understanding of why students fail, the social (not just individual) factors contributing to student difficulty, struggle, or failure, and the role of institutions in not only student learning and success, but also student stress and failure. Further, we hope these resources inspire institutions to take student voices seriously, to promote institution-wide empathy and compassion towards students, and to redefine success at an institutional level in a manner that centers student experience.

Featured Resources