Instructional Ecology Instructional Ecology

Josh Vincent, Art professor and guest in episode 13, asked several of his classes to think about the meaning and experience of failure. He created a dropbox in his classes so that students could anonymously submit their ideas. In this bonus episode, Josh reads his students' thoughts, jokes, and meditations on how they experience failure in Art classes. We consider their ideas, respond, and think about ways forward in facing failure in higher education and life.Join us to hear some student perspective on failure as our season ends.

In our season finale for Season 4: Facing Failure, we have a conversation with Art professor Josh Vincent about the inevitability of failure in ceramics classes and the joy the intertwining of success and failure can bring.We’re at the stage of a journey through the underworld where we have returned to hearth and home. We sit back among our family and friends and tell our stories of suffering and adventure. We tell stories to give our lives meaning and Josh talks about his experience teaching in a number of higher education institutions and what he’s learned about the importance of creating a learning environment and tearing down barriers students experience.We also add up some of what we’ve learned this season about failure in higher education as we look back on our journey. And also tease a bonus episode with student perspective on failure that will follow in two weeks’ time! Join us for our final conversation of the season. 

We begin to think about return from the underworld. In myths of journeys to the underworld, the protagonists must always figure out how to return alive. So, what’s the trick to allow you return safely and bring whatever treasure or knowledge back with you to use in life on the surface, in the sunlight? Today, we spend time with a part of the college that depends on constantly engaging attempt and failure and revision and new heights: our college writing classes.Our guest is Michael Kennedy, new hire in the English Department, and an instructor who is deeply invested in teaching students where they are. Michael talks about writing as a chance for learners to "fall in love with their own mind" because through writing (and writing again and again) we come to better understand our own ideas and thoughts about complex subjects. If students are willing to explore the darkness of uncertainty through writing without fear that they’ll be judged or given a failing grade for trying, what might become possible? We also explore another guide for our season in the underworld: the scholar bell hooks. Her ideas about ethical relationship to one another could be another way to face failure in the classroom and turn it into resilience. 

Instead of a story of failure, today’s episode is a story of grief. It is a literal story, a work of fiction, based on an actual event.I’m in conversation with English professor Andrea West because when I was asking anyone who came within earshot of me about whether there was a place for loss and grief in higher education, she said something unusual. She said, well, I think there’s a story we could ask about that.Andrea and I talk about a very short story by the Indian American novelist Bharahti Mukherjee called, The Management of Grief. begins in the aftermath of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. The flight was traveling from Montreal to Delhi and Bombay by way of London. It exploded off of the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board. This podcast will not go into the further details of the incident but there are some resources on the web page that you can explore if you’d like to know more. This story is many things but relevant to our concerns, it asks questions that we ask at the college: if we have official processes to follow, what happens when a person’s emotions and life circumstances don’t fit inside of what we expect?This episode was tricky to make and perhaps it fails to convey what we hoped. Your host meditates on the constant risk of failure and the worth of completing a project even if it is an imperfect thing. 

Hello, my community. Your host will be out on medical leave for a few weeks, so the Failure season will experience a short delay. Listen in for details.

This episode is another chance for us to consider the emotion around failure, which most of our instructional community acknowledges is something that higher education would really rather avoid dealing with. The guiding question is: what is the place for loss and grief in higher education? We return to three voices about failure: Professor Elena Martinez-Vidal, counselor Cyntrell Legette and, from our first Failure episode last season, Professor TK Kimel. With our guests, we'll explore in more detail what students lose when they leave an institution of higher education because it's much more than just a career option. We also examine the connections between loss and grief and get much further into our thinking about what educational grief could be. Finally, we begin some early thinking on how better understanding of student loss and grief might change the ways in which we respond to failure. In keeping with our season of new conversations and ideas, we make a beginning of new possibilities when we look at student failure through the lens of loss and grief.