Coaxing success from failure through academic development

ABSTRACT

One way to support academics as whole people is to address the psychology of success and failure in academic work. Despite their success in securing doctorates and academic positions, academics often feel like imposters. The current neoliberal audit culture reinforces this sense by demanding more and more of them in terms of outputs that are ‘successful’ when measured and thus financialised. But the feelings of failure such an environment seems designed to elicit from them can be addressed productively. In this article, we address how academic developers can enable academics to reconceptualise their ‘failures’ as teachable moments by ‘re-storying’ them to locate the value of failure in academic work. We explore a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching seminar activity that allows participants to re-story a ‘failure’ and a symposium on failure, which elicited stories of ‘failure’ from a panel of exemplary tertiary teachers to show how open talk about it can ‘normalize’ failure as part of every academic career and a learning experience. By facilitating such talk, academic developers can enable academics to push back against the sense that academia is only about success stories, and to embrace ‘successful failure’.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning from failure
• audit culture
• meta-reflexivity
• holistic academic development
• the infinite game

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Carter

Susan Carter is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research Development at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has given full-time support to doctoral students as a learning advisor (2004–2012). As an academic developer, she is interested in how academics might be encouraged to thrive within the higher education environment today.

Sean Sturm

Sean Sturm (Ngāti Pākehā, Ngāti Rakaipāka) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Critical Studies in Education in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. He leads the Higher Education programme at the University and researches at the intersection of the fields of the philosophy of education, critical university studies, and settler studies.

Emmanuel Manalo

Emmanuel Manalo is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Kyoto University in Japan. His research interest is in improving teaching and learning practices so that they better align with the requirements of the technologically advanced environments of the current century. He is author/editor of over 150 research publications, including Deeper Learning, Dialogic Learning, and Critical Thinking: Research-based Strategies for the Classroom (Routledge, 2019).