The increasingly neoliberal course of Higher Education is linked to rises in student anxiety around assessment and increased fear of the consequences of failure. Making mistakes is an inevitable part of any learning process (and of life generally) and managing failure in a productive and positive way is crucial for success and wellbeing beyond…

Taking Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)" as a literary vehicle, this article uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine the problem of what to do with our desires in the philosophy of education. The article describes an apprenticeship, a personal process of learning in which an ethical rapport with…

Failure can be an effective tool for learning, but it comes with negative consequences. Educators and learners should practice strategies that leverage the benefits of failure while managing its negative consequences on learners' motivation and persistence. Towards that goal, this paper examines the biological effects of failure on learning to (1)…

Background and Context: Productive failure (PF) is a learning paradigm that flips the order of instruction: students work on a problem, then receive a lesson. PF increases learning, but less is known about student emotions and collaboration during PF, particularly in a computer science context. Objective: To provide insight on students' emotions…

The author believes that in mathematics education, with ourselves AND with students or learners, people need to embrace failure as a beautiful thing -- an incredibly wonderful opportunity to learn more about the math or the tool or the people. The five characteristics of provocative objects can help to understand how to design such lovely failure,…

The sentiment that creativity is the most important skill needed to solve the problems that we face is repeated by different business and industry leaders around the world (Bronson & Merryman, 2010; NEA, n.d.; Nussbaum et al., 2005; Sammio, 2017). The call for creativity has been amplified in response to the problems and obstacles caused by…

Experiencing failure is an important part of the learning process, but undergraduate students often hold a negative perception of failure that may contribute to fear of failure and risk avoidance. We investigated the influence of instructor feedback, discussions of failure in the classroom, and course-level and institutional structures on…

Empirical evidence demonstrates the effect of productive failure (Kapur, 2008) on disciplinary knowledge. However, there is no clear theoretical explanation for why this is the case. Empirical evidence on argumentation and education shows the impact of curricular embedded deliberative argumentation on learning. However, these two trends of…

Greek literature prior to Plato featured two conceptions of education. Learning takes place when people encounter "teacher-guides"--educators, mentors, and advisors. But education also occurs outside of a pedagogical relationship between learner and teacher-guide: people learn through painful experience. In composing his dramatic…

Failure has an important role to play in learning how to navigate highly uncertain organizational environments. But "failing fast" just for its own sake may in fact undermine learning if not set up or handled correctly. Using failure-based pedagogy, including generative failure, whole-person learning, and entrepreneurial thinking, an MBA…

Meaningful and impactful learning experiences are rife with failure. And yet, students struggle with framing, tolerating and attributing failure in a positive manner within the post-secondary learning context. This paper explores whether using design thinking as a pedagogical approach might help students learn to tolerate, reframe and attribute…

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…

It is difficult to motivate learners to seek out and persist at challenging learning tasks where failure is likely. However, in game environments, people seem highly motivated to engage with challenges and respond productively to failure. Many typical game features purportedly enhance intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, which should improve…

Productive failure has shown positive effects on conceptual and transfer measures, but no clear effects on procedural measures. It is therefore an open question whether, and to what extent, productive failure methods may be used to enhance the learning of procedural skills. A typical productive failure study focuses on a single, complex concept;…

This article describes accounts of grading reform initiatives that while well-intentioned, met with staunch opposition and eventually were abandoned. The implementation strategies employed by the leaders of these reform initiative are explored, along with reasons these strategies failed to result in meaningful and enduring change. Alternative…