Failure: Learning in Progress
Failure: Learning in Progress
Resource Hub
Welcome to the Failure: Learning in Progress Resource Hub!
Here students, instructors, and administrators can access a variety of resources related to learning from failure (in higher education and beyond). These resources come from a broad range of disciplines and sources – some of them have been produced by the FLIP Team, and others have been recommended or produced by our collaborators and colleagues.
Resources may be filtered by discipline, research focus, resource type, and target audience. Compiling and sharing resources is an ongoing and collective task, and we invite you to collaborate with us in it. If you know of a great resource that belongs here, contact us at info@learningfromfailure.ca.
For Students
Pressure to succeed, constraints on time, and social inequalities can foster more fear of failure than sense of opportunity. With the resources gathered here, our goal is to equip all students with the tools to embrace failure as a learning process and feel supported while doing so.
For Instructors
Failure can be a central concern for instructors in terms of pedagogy, research, and career trajectory. The resources provided here aim to assist instructors in developing equity-focused pedagogy and navigate the stakes and stresses of failure in their careers and institutions.
For Administrators
Discourses of failure and resiliency have become increasingly prevalent in higher education institutions. These resources seek to guide program development, institutional supports, and educator training toward equitable policies for learning, teaching, and research.
Example Bank: Learning from Failure Across the Disciplines
This bank of examples is provided as a resource for instructors, students, or anyone interested in learning about the failures, missteps, obstacles and accidents that have contributed to many notable inventions, innovations, and discoveries.
Productive Failure
This study demonstrates an existence proof for productive failure: engaging students in solving complex, ill-structured problems without the provision of support structures can be a productive exercise in failure. In a computer-supported collaborative learning setting, eleventh-grade science students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions…
The Power of Student Agency: Looking Beyond Grit to Close the Opportunity Gap
Rhetoric’s of grit and determination surround discourses of student resiliency. While grit is necessary to overcome inevitable obstacles on the road to success, it is quite dependent on agency. Those without the free will to choose their own fate face limits on their ability to be successful, regardless of their grit. This book encompasses…
FAIL Is Not a Four-Letter Word: A Theoretical Framework for Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Approaches to Academic Challenges and Responses to Failure in STEM Learning Environments
Navigating scientific challenges, persevering through difficulties, and coping with failure are considered hallmarks of a successful scientist. However, relatively few studies investigate how undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students develop these skills and dispositions or how instructors can facilitate this…
Instructor Perspectives on Failure and Its Role in Learning in Higher Education
Reflecting on failure is a critically important component of the learning process. However, relatively little scholarship to date has examined instructor perspectives of failure, including how failure informs their approaches to teaching and learning. This case study explores instructor perspectives on failure using data collected from a series of…
Visualizing the Power and Privilege of Failure in Higher Education
Learning from failure is a core component to education, however it is not often deliberately taught in university courses. In addition, while the rhetoric around taking risks, embracing failure, and bouncing back is pervasive in higher education, the corresponding structural supports are lacking. The purpose of the current work is to explore ways…
Instructor Wishlist for Institutions
Compiled from a series of semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020 with tenured, pre-tenure, contingent faculty and postdoctoral fellows across the University of Toronto Mississauga, this “wish list” captures a snapshot of pedagogical techniques and changes desired by these instructors to facilitate equitable teaching, research, and policy…
Student Wishlist for Institutions
This “Wishlist” has been compiled from responses to a student survey distributed electronically at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Spring 2021. The survey, which solicited responses from students across disciplines and academic years, was composed of quantitative questions posed on a seven-point Likert scale, as well as qualitative…
The power behind the screen: Educating competent technology users in the age of digitized inequality
Digital technologies are deeply embedded in social, economic, and political hegemonies both past and present. Understanding the power dynamics, inequalities, and oppressions at work in and through digital technologies stands as a precondition to educating fully literate, fully competent digital citizens and technology users. This article is…
Science students’ perspectives on how to decrease the stigma of failure
Failure is hard-wired into the scientific method and yet teaching students to productively engage with failure is not foundational in most biology curricula. To train successful scientists, it is imperative that we teach undergraduate science students to be less fearful of failure and to instead positively accept it as a productive part of the…
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.
Featured Resources
Fish Outta Water Podcast
Welcome to Fish Outta Water, your unofficial university survival guide! In this podcast, hosts and UTM students, Harleen and Loridee talk all about the transition into university, overcoming failure, and what it’s like to be thrown into the swirling rapids of undergrad without a life jacket. Learn how to survive these treacherous waters through…
Science students’ perspectives on how to decrease the stigma of failure
Failure is hard-wired into the scientific method and yet teaching students to productively engage with failure is not foundational in most biology curricula. To train successful scientists, it is imperative that we teach undergraduate science students to be less fearful of failure and to instead positively accept it as a productive part of the…
Learning Journal
These Learning through Failure Journals can be done as in-class reflective activities at multiple points during term.
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.
Featured Resources
Instructor Perspectives on Failure and Its Role in Learning in Higher Education
Reflecting on failure is a critically important component of the learning process. However, relatively little scholarship to date has examined instructor perspectives of failure, including how failure informs their approaches to teaching and learning. This case study explores instructor perspectives on failure using data collected from a series of…
Science students’ perspectives on how to decrease the stigma of failure
Failure is hard-wired into the scientific method and yet teaching students to productively engage with failure is not foundational in most biology curricula. To train successful scientists, it is imperative that we teach undergraduate science students to be less fearful of failure and to instead positively accept it as a productive part of the…
Learning Journal
These Learning through Failure Journals can be done as in-class reflective activities at multiple points during term.
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
Student Wishlist for Institutions
This “Wishlist” has been compiled from responses to a student survey distributed electronically at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Spring 2021. The survey, which solicited responses from students across disciplines and academic years, was composed of quantitative questions posed on a seven-point Likert scale, as well as qualitative…
Instructor Wishlist for Institutions
Compiled from a series of semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020 with tenured, pre-tenure, contingent faculty and postdoctoral fellows across the University of Toronto Mississauga, this “wish list” captures a snapshot of pedagogical techniques and changes desired by these instructors to facilitate equitable teaching, research, and policy…
Visualizing the Power and Privilege of Failure in Higher Education
Learning from failure is a core component to education, however it is not often deliberately taught in university courses. In addition, while the rhetoric around taking risks, embracing failure, and bouncing back is pervasive in higher education, the corresponding structural supports are lacking. The purpose of the current work is to explore ways…