Sam Phillips and Risa Applegarth

Introduction: Public Pedagogies of Failure

For many of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the walls of our classrooms routinely offered a defense of failure. Resilience posters introduced young people to messages about failure’s salutary impacts. Sam recalls a poster that read “If at first you don’t succeed, you’re in good company,” which featured photos and lists of early “failures” of presidents Lincoln, Eisenhower, Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt. Risa recalls a Michael Jordan poster in which he enumerates the shots he’s missed and the games he’s lost, concluding, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Even absent such posters, many students are offered failure-related truisms such as “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Such messages communicate a pedagogy of failure to students, one that frames failure as valuable, educational, a temporary setback on the way toward eventual success.

In contrast, consider the experience of a novice teacher who is overwhelmed and uncertain, one who shows up day after day feeling like they are failing their students. This teacher’s embodied experience of failure is hard to align with the aphoristic posters on the walls. Failure in this experience endures, returning each day when the teacher returns to the classroom; it expands into the teacher’s evenings and weekends, as they wonder what their students need and how to provide it. Failure in this experience has stakes for the present, for both teacher and students. Whether such a failure will eventually become part of the teacher’s (or students’) recuperative narratives of resilience is far from guaranteed: it is perhaps just as likely that this experience of failure will linger with the teacher through feelings of regret, or lead the teacher to seek a different professional path, or lead to students becoming disconnected from the subject matter or disengaged with their schooling. If good teaching can be transformative, it stands to reason that inexpert or ineffective teaching can be similarly significant for students.

We share these two competing pedagogies of failure to highlight the contrast between the abstract aphorisms on the wall and the frustrating, painful, grueling specificity of the embodied experience. Despite the promises offered by inspirational classroom posters, and regardless of whether we are the ones who are failing or the ones being failed, the outcomes of failure cannot be known in advance. This essay emerged from our sense that valorizing failure – whether articulating it as a counter-stance or recuperating it into stories of resilience and success – often glosses over what may be painful, long-lasting, and consequential for those who experience writing- or classroom-related failures. This valorization also glosses over relationships and positions—the difference between failing at something and failing others, such as our students. In short, there are stakes attached to failure; our position when we experience it, and the way it feels and endures matters. These dimensions of failure (stakes, position, affect, and duration) all assist in our task to make failure specific, contextually situated, and thus useful as a concept explored within the writing classroom, rather than merely valorized on its walls.

In the same way that we ask teachers to engage with failure in situ, we likewise see risk as a term that has been sometimes valorized in writing studies without being clearly defined. If risk in general indicates exposure to the possibility of adverse or unwelcome circumstances, [1] in the heuristic below, we largely advocate that students should not experience such exposures. Due to differences in power and the difficulty of students’ consenting to the circumstances of their education, many or even most risks are not acceptable to ask students to undertake in the classroom. We return to this in greater detail when we outline the role of stakes in our heuristic. However, intellectual risk is something we define more narrowly as exposure to the possibility of changing one’s mind. Under this definition, intellectual risk is not only acceptable but essential, the very groundwork required to build one’s mind cumulatively over time. In intellectual risk, one isn’t risking failure so much as risking a range of ramifications that follow from a shift in point of view. These might include the discomfort of admitting one has been wrong, the labor of revising to integrate a contrary piece of evidence or a new perspective, and even the resistance a writer might feel to a perspective that challenges their own deeply held beliefs or identifications. These intellectual risks are all distinct from the academic and material risks that follow from risking failure.

Precisely what students experience as intellectually risky will be as varied as their embodiments and experiences; consequently, we do not think teachers can predict in advance what constitutes intellectual risk for the participants in their classrooms. Nevertheless, we see this narrower definition of intellectual risk as pedagogically valuable insofar as it, too, encourages teachers to think about intellectual risk and failure with attentiveness to specific contexts and embodiments.

By developing a heuristic to guide teachers through consideration of these facets of failure, we conceptualize failure as an embodied experience, situated in specific circumstances. This does not mean we reject its significance in relation to teaching writing. Instead, we argue that teachers can make use of failure by engaging with it as a situated and embodied experience. In what follows, we first characterize two primary lines of defense that have appeared in writing studies scholarship over the past decade. One, a weak defense of failure, finds promise in iterative failures, in “failing forward,” and aims to normalize small-scale failures as stepping stones toward eventual success. In contrast, the strong defense of failure aims to resist and subvert the teleological imperatives implied within the concept of failing forward, as Carr notes in her 2024 retrospective. Aligned with Halberstam’s assertion that queer failures can offer “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world,” the strong defense links failure with resistance and subversion of unchosen, often neoliberal, norms and criteria. Yet by recuperating “failure,” both the strong and weak defense overlook the differential stakes attached to failure as an experienced, embodied event.

In response to failure’s uptake within writing studies, we foreground failure’s embodied and experiential dimensions—its situatedness in concrete rhetorical ecosystems. We offer the heuristic below as a support for teachers, enabling teachers to linger in close consideration of failure’s specificity rather than moving directly past failure into recuperation. In this way, we address ourselves to those within writing studies who have absorbed the sense that failure can be good, but who remain uncertain what “productive failure” should look like in practice. Teachers who are aware of our field’s orientation toward failure might be inclined, for instance, to give students “opportunities to fail”; for such teachers we offer the heuristic below to guide them toward an empathetic exercise in perspective taking, to consider what might be at stake for students in a potential experience of failure. Additionally, we offer guidance to those who are engaged in teacher training or professional development. The heuristic below can serve to support teachers who want to make “failure” a useful concept within their writing pedagogies. We believe that there’s a pedagogical space for engaging with failure as a concept alongside students, but doing so requires that teachers understand and communicate to students what pedagogical purpose failure serves in situ rather than in general.

Two Defenses of Failure in Writing Studies

At least since Donald Murray’s 1968 acknowledgment that “the writer tries to say something, and fails, and through failure tries to say it better, and fails, but perhaps, eventually, he says it well enough” (Murray 119), our field has operated with implicit awareness of failure as part of the iterative work of developing writerly capacities. Over the past dozen years, though, scholars in our field have devoted increased attention explicitly to the examination of failure. Prompted especially by Carr’s generative essay In Support of Failure and Asao Inoue’s foundational work in writing assessment, writing studies scholars have articulated the salience of failure in relation to a range of writing studies concerns, including pedagogy, program administration, graduate education, plagiarism, and more. [2] Across this scholarship we perceive two primary modes of engagement with failure. The first, which we identify as a weak defense of failure, recuperates failure as a dimension of successful learning and growth. This is “weak” not in a pejorative sense, but insofar as scholarship in this vein does not prize failure for its own sake, but instead values productive outcomes of failure, in the form of growth, resilience, creative problem solving, discovery, practice, eventual mastery, and so on. According to scholarship in this mode, failure can generate salutary effects for writers on their way to success. The second mode we identify as a strong defense of failure, because scholarship in this mode argues for valuing failure for its own sake. This formulation of failure is often positioned as an antithesis to the weak defense; rooted broadly in Halberstam’s work on queer failure, the strong defense of failure in writing studies eschews the idea that failure is a means to success, instead adopting a stance toward failure as a good in itself.

Weak Defense: “Fail Better.”

Formulations that invite writers and writing teachers to embrace failure as a stepping stone toward success abound in writing studies scholarship. This abundance reflects the fact that writing studies has long advanced a practice- and process-based orientation to writing. In recognition of that process orientation, much scholarship aims to normalize writing-related failures. In this vein, scholars attempt to defuse some of the negative affects that “failure” typically entails, recuperating failure into our models of practice and normalizing writing failures as vital dimensions of learning. Asao Inoue, for instance, argued in 2014 in favor of “more productive and educative conceptions of failure” (332), advancing a labor-based assessment practice that “reorients students” toward habits, dispositions, and behaviors that ultimately enable their “academic success” (345). In a similar mode, Michelle LaFrance and Steven J. Corbett assert that “we become better writers by failing, sometimes abysmally, at the writing tasks set before us” (295). These and similar works of scholarship argue in favor of understanding failure as a normal, mundane, everyday experience—something that students should anticipate rather than dread and avoid. Yet stigma around writing failures remains; as LaFrance and Corbett acknowledge, “few among us like to talk about failure, let alone admit to the ways we have failed” (295). Resituating failures as everyday occurrences within writing contexts can be seen as an effort to neutralize the affective potency of failure. These works argue that failure in writing cannot be avoided; consequently, they suggest, our role as teachers is to open up failure for discussion in ways that reduce the negative emotional freight that both the concept and the experience of failure tends to carry.

Additional work in writing studies approaches failure not merely as mundane but positively pursued for the sake of the learning opportunities it ostensibly generates for writers and students. This scholarship aims to “make moments of failure opportunities for growth and improvement” (Corbett 7). For instance, Amanda French argues that writing should be approached with an orientation toward “failing better,” to teach students that “struggle and productive failure [are] necessary components” of learning to write across and beyond higher education contexts (409). [3] Similarly, Paul Feigenbaum’s conceptualization of “generative failure” frames failure positively within routine practices of mutual support and feedback; as he explains, “within environments that foster intrinsic motivation, failure represents constructive feedback in an ongoing process of growth, thus supporting students’ deep engagement with learning” (404). Collectively, this work argues “for failure’s transformative qualities” and “offer[s] the view that failure should be embraced and harnessed as a force for growth and creativity” (Suphap 246). In general, then, when writing studies scholarship invites students to “fail better,” it does so through attention to affect and duration. This defense of failure enjoins writers to modulate their affective relationships with experiences of writing failure, by recognizing writing (and growth or development as writers) as an iterative, perpetual process, one in which momentary experiences of struggle ultimately help the writer develop new techniques, practices, and capacities. Because all writers experience some form of writing failure, we can fail better as learners by adjusting our affective relationship to failure and our temporal awareness of its importance en route to success.

Strong Defense: “Failure May be Your Style.”

The strong defense of failure is closely linked to queer failure, as popularized by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure. In an oft-cited passage, Halberstam says that “Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well”; in contrast to the inspirational slogans generated by the weak defense, they cite one of Quentin Crisp’s trademark bons mots: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style” (3). For Halberstam, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2–3). The qualifier “under certain circumstances” points to the in situ quality of failure that we hope to make more explicit. The failure Halberstam endorses involves “a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing” (11–12)—to wit, a rejection of the standards of success associated with neoliberal thought. To call this failure is perhaps a slightly cheeky appropriation of hegemonic terms, since failing to live up to a normative standard one rejects is quite different from failing oneself. Similarly, Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell and William P. Banks organize their book around a set of “failures” that ironically repurpose normative visions of success: “failing to succeed,” “failing to be commodified,” “failing to be reproduced,” “failing to be mechanized.” “Against the constraints of normativity,” they write, “we imagine a queer liminality of affect that challenges hegemonic narratives of education’s endless failures” (6). Our point isn’t to devalue these moves to queer normative success by embracing the term “failure.” But it seems to us that failure as a disciplinary keyword has at times been taken up in ways that conflate the weak and strong defenses. Before deploying a “pedagogy of failure,” we ask teachers to clarify for themselves (and make explicit for their students) what valences failure carries in situ.

Carr has pointedly addressed this conflation in Following Failure (2024), as she grapples with the legacy of her earlier article “In Support of Failure” (2013). She describes a sense of disappointment with her earlier article and a need to account for what she sees as failures in her previous argument. That argument, she says,

tacitly assumes a freedom of choice and a certain amount of insulation or protection among those who might take up my call. Yet, as a pedagogical platform, failure is not neutrally positioned, nor equitably accessible for all. What I did not understand then, but which I cannot unsee now, is how much that argument presumes and promotes a neoliberal worldview that for all of its subversive artifice simply reinscribes preexisting channels for privilege and exclusion/oppression. (Following)

What Carr seems to identify in her earlier work is a lack of attention to situation, to what our heuristic names as stakes and position. As Carr notes, echoing Halberstam’s phrasing, failure may still, “under the right conditions,” provide ways of resisting or queering normative logics of success. “But too often,” she continues, “the term is invoked in shorthand, or with only surface meaning from within, tacitly in service to those logics.” In Carr’s earlier contribution to Bad Ideas About Writing, Failure is Not an Option, she situates her argument for failure in opposition to the weak defense, which she summarizes: “failure is acceptable if we learn from it. If we can recuperate it, if it brings us virtue and strength and morality because what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” (76). Instead, she says, “Failure should be welcomed, if not actively sought out, signaling as it does both the presence of creative, risky thinking and an opportunity to explore a new direction” (76). Here Carr identifies one potential way of understanding the relationship between risk and failure, an alignment that points to the valorization of both risk and failure in writing studies. Often failure is what one risks in undertaking academic or intellectual risks in a classroom setting, a consequence that might follow from “creative, risky thinking.” But as we elaborate below, writing teachers are better served by keeping risk and failure distinct and situating both concepts in specific, embodied situations. What Carr proposes in Following Failure is a further refinement of this stance, one that attends to failure in situ rather than in general. Our aim in this essay, then, is to offer writing teachers a concrete heuristic that scaffolds attention to failure in situ rather than in general.

Failure In Situ: A Heuristic for Writing Teachers

In contrast to the defenses of failure outlined above, we posit that failure should be employed pedagogically only in situ—as an embodied and situated experience. As Elizabeth Wardle argues that “there is no such thing as writing in general” (30), we likewise submit that there is no “failure” in general. And echoing Karen Tellez-Trujillo, we understand failure as situated and context-specific; it “means something different to everyone, and each relationship with failure has developed in a unique way” (127). As an embodied phenomenon, failure is experienced differently by different bodies; consequently, our use of failure as a pedagogical concept should anticipate rather than override these differences. Failure as we articulate it through the heuristic below involves stakes; it impacts relations among individuals who occupy varying positions; it activates complex and sometimes unpredictable affects; and all these dimensions are experienced temporally through duration.

Our critique of the valorization of failure aligns with Sam Hamilton’s interrogation of academic risk-taking. Hamilton observes that teachers “like to talk about risk,” to “tell our students to ‘Be Bold,’ expect and accept failure, cultivate a sense of adventure, or fuck up a little” (para. 1). But, he notes, the idea that students need to take risks assumes that students enter our classrooms “timid, cowardly, and risk-averse” (para. 21), though he observes that, “given their capacity to engage in profoundly dangerous and destructive behavior, they can be quite enamored with risk” (para. 15). To explain this contradiction, Hamilton points out that what teachers often think of as risks “are so calculated, so thought through as to not really be risky at all” (para. 20)—that is, “it’s not just that the risk we want students to take as students pales in comparison to the risks they already know how to take; it’s that the risk we want students to take as students doesn’t really appear to be risky at all” (para. 19). We would extend this characterization of classroom-based, teacher-invited risks by attending to the stakes attached to intellectual risk-taking. When we ask a student to take a risk in their writing—through formal or conceptual experimentation, through consideration of unanticipated audiences or impacts, or through intellectual openness to new arguments—we render that action no longer risky in academic terms, assuming our grading is at all consistent with our solicitation of “risky” writing.

From this perspective, the problem with valorizing risk-taking is that the classroom context serves to neutralize the risks a teacher might reasonably ask a student to take. Instead, we can design opportunities for students to engage in reflection, practice openness to others’ perspectives, communicate honestly and even vulnerably with others, and consider how their points of view and even deeply held stances might shift through new learning experiences—all practices aligned with intellectual risk-taking—without framing these practices as “risky.”

By contrast, we find pedagogical value in the concept of failure not despite but because of its situated and embodied specificity. Instead of obscuring the consequences and contingencies of failure under truisms about resilience or embracing “failure” to mark a critical or antinormative stance toward goals or ends that we reject, the heuristic below supports teachers’ inquiry into the contours of “failure” within their situated classroom contexts. Teachers may find it especially useful as an invitation to think about their students’ specificity, their positions and emotional investments in their writing, as well as both concrete and more amorphous consequences they might experience as a result of any particular act of “failure” we might invite. By speaking of risk and failure with our students as situated and experiential phenomena, we invite consideration of criteria, audience, genre, convention, and negotiation among these dimensions as writers. Although the paragraphs below move from stakes to position to affect to duration as though each can be experienced in isolation, in fact, of course, these dimensions of failure overlap and intertwine with each other.

To model the use of this heuristic, we’ll consider each point in relation to an assignment Sam designed for use in a first-year composition course. The “Infodump” assignment draws on neuroqueer rhetorics and Autistic online communities, where the concept of the infodump as an often-unwieldy stream of exposition, notably in science fiction writing, has been reappropriated to refer to the in-depth explanations of special interests that are denigrated by neurotypical rhetorical standards. The assignment asks students to identify a special interest and to “write about [it] without worrying about boring your audience or talking too much.” By design, students’ written products fail to consider the classic elements of the rhetorical situation by taking the rhetor’s personal interest as a sufficient exigence, imagining no audience or an audience with identical interests, and disregarding normative constraints wherever possible. The assignment is an extension of what Peter Elbow called “closing my eyes as I speak,” or writing with as little audience consideration as possible. Students often describe past experiences being shut down while discussing special interests, especially as children, and in setting up the Infodump, we discuss both the ways that rhetorical norms of reciprocity may be necessary and the ways they privilege neurotypical communication. By highlighting (through an assignment such as the Infodump) the situatedness of failure, we create opportunities to talk with students about the contingencies of audience expectations and of our attempts at meeting or subverting those expectations.

Stakes

Stakes are a vital dimension of both risk and failure. To risk fundamentally requires that stakes be attached, that something of consequence would follow from a risk one is taking. We may be able to think of failures that could transpire without stakes (as when I fail at something no one including me cares about), but risks only happen when stakes are attached. Teachers often use the language of stakes to characterize aspects of their course design. Assignments, activities and assessments may be high- or low-stakes, with stakes most clearly mapping onto a potential grade impact. Writing tasks that are marked complete or incomplete, or aren’t even turned in, are usually “low-stakes.” Implicitly, these tasks allow students to write without fear of being wrong, of “failing.” After all, for most college students in most courses, the stakes of failing at a given task may include failing a course, with the attendant loss of whatever tuition they’ve paid, as well as institutional consequences such as academic probation or expulsion. Outside the classroom, to fail at a high-stakes writing task—by not submitting a report required by a supervisor, by writing a formulaic or off-the-mark application essay—might entail losing a job, a scholarship, a grant or an apartment. Such losses are generally not what people mean when they say students should be encouraged to fail. It is understood that the kinds of failure we valorize for students are low-stakes from an institutional perspective—nobody, we’d imagine, is encouraging formal experimentation on housing applications, for instance.

The kinds of failure we’re more likely to value are the noble failures that happen when students try to write in an unfamiliar genre or to adopt a new writerly voice, pushing themselves beyond safe or comfortable rhetorical choices in order to stretch themselves as writers. If a teacher wants students to take the risks that may lead to these kinds of failure, it’s often necessary to limit institutional and material stakes as much as possible, not only for ethical reasons, but because, as a rule, students are too smart to value intellectual risk over grades in a country where a bachelor’s degree is more-or-less mandatory for a living wage outside the skilled trades.

Because the Infodump assignment asks students to “fail” according to conventional standards, it’s essential to remove external stakes that might constrain the writing process, especially evaluative grading. That is to say, we do not want students to experience the Infodump assignment as risky: stakes are minimized to prevent risk from entering into students’ decision-making. Because we teach at an institution that requires us to submit grades, Sam uses an ungrading method for this assignment (and more generally) that sets basic parameters of length (1,000 words or comparable multimodal work) for students to receive credit. Anything a student turns in that meets these parameters is given full credit. In the absence of institutional stakes, students are often happy to take big compositional swings, especially in experimenting with unfamiliar genres. Taking away stakes—taking away risk—enables intellectual experimentation and exploration.

By explicitly defining what is and is not at stake for students as they complete this assignment, the heuristic helps to clarify what’s meant by failure in this context and to sort the pedagogically useful aspects from those that would interfere with students’ engagement in the task. Genuine risk-taking might not be fair to require in academic contexts. Indeed, we can cultivate opportunities for intellectual engagement, curiosity, and experimentation without framing any of these practices as risky. In the following sections, we continue to note the ways stakes influence rhetorical situations differentially, depending on students’ and teachers’ positions, as well as the quality of affects and the duration of failure. These dimensions are less predictable and require a greater degree of flexibility from teachers and students.

Position

The classroom is traditionally defined by the relationship between the teacher and student positions, with the teacher wielding expertise and institutional power and students operating within the teacher’s parameters. Despite the best efforts of liberal pedagogues, perhaps especially in composition, this is still the basic arrangement in almost any college class. As Elbow writes in The Pedagogy of the Bamboozled, “teachers hide their authority and run away from their authority, but in both cases allow rationality to serve as smoke screen or static to mask the process and fool both themselves and students” (251). While we can and often should cede control to students in one way or another, in almost all cases it isn’t possible to actually change positions. The nature of the institution means that the teacher can never help but to be the final authority, whether they exercise that authority overtly or not.

Removing institutional stakes through ungrading is one way of ceding control, though it’s essential to keep in mind that the teacher always retains final say and that alternative assessment practices are not intrinsically liberatory. Sherri Craig argues incisively that uncritically adopted contract grading practices “ignore the anti-Black racism rampant in many English departments and IWPs. [They] also ignore the systemic racism present at universities and the utter lack of approaches to such ‘equitable’ grading practices across the curriculum—an absence that leads to student confusion and a lack of preparation and transfer” (145). Attending to position in relation to failure requires clear-eyed acknowledgement of a student’s relation to their teacher and of students’ embodied positionalities. As other scholars have noted, “failure pedagogy benefits from being infused with critical theories on race, gender, queerness, disability, class, … explor[ing] these issues from an intersectional perspective” (Suphap 254). But crucially, students’ positions are also shaped by their past experiences and the developing social ecosystem of the classroom, neither of which can be anticipated.

For the Infodump assignment, students are asked—explicitly—to assume the expert position. Many students describe past experiences with teachers who specifically told them not to write as though they were experts, often in tandem with the classic “don’t use ‘I’” rule, as in, “Don’t tell the reader what you think; you’re not the expert.” Fair enough, perhaps, since most high schoolers aren’t actually specialists in Hamlet or the Civil War. In contrast, the Infodump asks them to identify a special interest in part because of the position of relative expertise they may already hold. Beyond this, the assignment asks them to consciously take on the position of authority as they write and to imagine an audience that respects that position. The point here is that students consider how taking on an expert position shifts the stakes and parameters of rhetorical failure: yammering becomes a lecture; impertinence becomes advice. By asking students to claim a position of authority, the assignment points to the ways that expertise and mastery are contingent positions negotiated interpersonally or even claimed unilaterally, negotiations that reflect a rhetor’s embodied positionalities, not merely whatever empirical knowledge they may have. Because the assignment explicitly positions students as experts and invites students to speak about a topic they in fact know well, it foregrounds the ways that expertise and mastery are negotiated and performed in relation to specific audiences. The audience, in turn, is asked to assume a position of granting such status and authority to the speaker. Through making this an explicit dimension of the assignment, students are reassured that their performance of expertise will be recognized rather than rejected, thus mitigating or removing a typical risk one takes in an interpersonal situation when adopting an expert stance.

Of course, different students have different relationships to expertise. Most teachers are familiar with the student who has no problem at all assuming an expert position, regardless of the subject or situation. This attitude often (certainly not always) coincides with privileged identities, but it also develops as a function of the interpersonal dynamic of the classroom, including horizontal relations between students. In situations where one voice begins to dominate the conversation, it’s often the teacher’s job to create stakes for certain types of communicative failure such as interruptions or shouting. It’s useful here to keep in mind Elbow’s advice: “An honest exercise of authority, even if hated, would not bamboozle” (251). The underlying student and teacher positions structure the ways that students can reposition themselves in relation to the assignment. What the heuristic proposes is that teachers attend to the preexisting and shifting positions in the classroom and adjust their understanding of failure accordingly, as well as maintaining transparency with students about the positions they actually hold and the positions they’re being asked to assume.

One further distinction bears mentioning here, between failing oneself and failing others. In the classroom, the teacher’s responsibility to the students means that their failures are much more likely to have consequences for others—the teacher who fails to explain a concept effectively or to offer timely feedback is failing the students in a way that’s qualitatively different from the kinds of student failure whose consequences are largely confined to the student doing the failing. For many teachers, building a classroom community is in part a matter of students taking on responsibility to their peers, whether concretely through group assignments, peer review and student-led exercises, or through the relationships of care and respect that develop between students over a semester. Valorizations of failure aren’t generally situated in social context—nobody suggests that students should queer academic labor by loafing on a group project or providing peer feedback in the form of cut-up poetry, for instance. Of course, pedagogically productive failures may be performed by a group working in concert, but the relative lack of attention to the transitive possibilities of failing others suggests that the weak and strong defenses share a view of failure where stakes exist primarily for the individual. When the individual’s actions have negative consequences for others, it becomes especially difficult to justify genuine risk-taking. By attending to position, teachers may better determine how a given failure is embedded in social context.

Affect

One origin point for this essay was our shared acknowledgment, aligned with Carr, Corbett, and others in our field, that to fail often feels horrible—a far cry from the liberatory, punk rock version of failure sometimes espoused by advocates of the strong defense of failure in our field. Just as writing can generate a range of affects—from the pleasures of “flow” to the agonies of what we experience as “tooth-pulling” writing, when the words have to be dragged laboriously to the page—so, too, does failure in writing activate a range of emotional responses. When we have failed, it has often felt terrible, and sometimes it has gone on feeling terrible for a long time. Furthermore, what it feels like to fail at a task can differ substantially from what it feels like to be a failure, to experience oneself as failing repeatedly, daily, at something one is trying hard to be good at.

Attending to affect is useful for teachers because we have found that even once institutional stakes have been removed, affective stakes often remain. These affective stakes are often connected with position, including the writer’s relationship with their teacher and peers. For instance, even if the writer’s grade isn’t impacted, critical feedback from peers or from the teacher can still sting. Risa still recalls the embarrassment that attended a grade she received on an early essay submitted in her first semester of college; though the professor was kind, pointing out through his feedback that she had misunderstood some basic parameters of the assignment, the fact that she had failed at such basics was itself mortifying. From the position of a poor, first-gen student from a tiny rural school, the feedback seemed to expose her lack of preparation for college. Although not knowing what “double-spaced” vs. “single-spaced” meant was a low-stakes misstep institutionally, affectively this failure seemed to confirm her lack of preparation for college in general.

Not only teachers but other students can play a role in shaping what it feels like for a student to fail. Interpersonal relationships among peers can prompt fears or anxieties around failure—again, even in the absence of institutional stakes for students’ writing performances. For instance, students often feel nervous about speaking aloud to their classmates, even when the institutional stakes for doing so are vanishingly small. Sam and Risa both routinely ask students to complete a brief informal presentation called a “Joy Share” early in the semester, a kind of show-and-tell that can be completed without preparation simply by standing in front of the class and telling others about something that brings you joy. Despite the low-stakes (complete or incomplete) grade, the low-pressure classroom, and the instructor-provided models that aim to lower the bar for students even further, nevertheless, every semester some number of students approach this task through an anxious strategy of failure-avoidance, delaying or simply never completing it. This emerges, we believe (and have sometimes heard from students explicitly), from their sense of the interpersonal risks that attend revealing oneself to one’s classmates. But the kinds of risks involved here, such as the risk of being embarrassed in a moment of vulnerability, are not the intellectual risks that Hamilton suggests we tend to valorize.

This heuristic invites teachers to engage in careful perspective-taking, enabling us to attend to the affective contours of what failure or potential failure might feel like for students positioned variously relative to each other, to college, to their professor. Students may still experience negative affects—embarrassment, anxiety, shame, fear. These affects can be mitigated, particularly when we’ve assured students that institutional stakes such as grade-related sanctions will be removed or minimized, but such affective responses to the feeling of failure can nevertheless inhibit communication and learning.

Through attending to the varied and fluctuating affects that failure might prompt for writers, we aim to open up to students the possibilities of relating otherwise to acts that could be construed as failures. For example, the Infodump assignment reclaims an act that could be seen as a failure: discoursing at length, without regard for an audience’s attention. There are affective dimensions to engaging in this practice. Some students may recall experiences of being chastised or socially shamed for speaking too long in the past, in both classroom and social settings, while others may recall mocking or ostracizing those who did so or witnessing instances of classmates’ speaking being sanctioned or policed in this way. Students are not served by teachers ignoring these affective dimensions and experiences; certainly, these prior experiences impact students’ capacity for taking up the invitation any given writing assignment offers. In contrast, articulating failure precisely and naming these affective dimensions can support students’ reclamation of (in this case) the maligned speaking practice of infodumping, transforming its affective associations from shame to pleasure.

It is important to note that stakes and affect may not precisely align. That is, one can fail at something that others do not care about and still feel terrible about it, just as one can fail in ways that are terribly consequential but that do not wreak affective havoc. Attending to affect, then, is distinct from considering stakes with students, and inviting students to articulate feelings of failure can be a useful pedagogical strategy for drawing students’ attention to their affective experiences with writing.

Duration

The final facet of this heuristic asks teachers to attend to the duration of an experience of failure. Despite aphoristic exhortations to understand writing failures as merely temporary setbacks on the way to mastery or success, in fact, as our discussion of affect suggests, even a discrete instance of failure may produce lingering affective and material consequences. And failure may be acute, iterative or chronic—a writer may fail once, fail repeatedly, fail continuously, even be a failure for an indefinite period. The weak defense of failure usually presumes that failure is transitory, a step or series of steps on an iterative path to success. In the weak defense of failure, even sustained states of failure are valued insofar as they are ultimately temporary—the faces on the “If at first you don’t succeed” poster are significant not because of their enumerated failures but because they all ultimately are understood as undeniable successes. The strong defense does value failure as a habitus, but here failure is often framed in positional terms as something one does with reference to normative standards—one fails hegemonic structures (transitively) but, implicitly, this failure is also a successful act of resistance. Failure as it is approached in the strong defense is of limited use for considering the destructive consequences of sustained experiences of failure associated with pervasive negative affects.

The communicative failure intrinsic to the Infodump has an explicit endpoint. Once the Infodump is completed, students’ next major assignment is to compose a text on the same subject, this time with an emphasis on writing to a specific audience. Whereas the Infodump is almost arhetorical in its disregard for reciprocal communication, this revised version foregrounds rhetoricity by emphasizing audience almost to the exclusion of other concerns. One student who had written a wall of text about a favorite videogame, for instance, revised that work into a brief speech designed to persuade their boyfriend to give the game a shot.

Writing teachers may invite reflection on failure by inquiring into events writers have experienced as temporary setbacks that they now recognize as important moves on the way toward success. Against those temporary failures, teachers might likewise invite contrary reflections regarding experiences we only recognize as failures in retrospect, or other ways in which our perceptions of success and failure may have shifted over time. The facet of duration in this way can support students’ attention to affect, inviting consideration of how their feelings of success, mastery, failure, and inadequacy may have shifted from moment to moment, semester to semester, or over longer expanses of time. Finally, affect and duration can be brought together through “preflection” (or forward-looking, anticipatory reflective writing) as well; we may ask how the anticipation of (possible, future) failure can itself generate affects, even when or if the predicted failure never materializes.

Conclusion

In her afterword to the recent collection If at First You Don’t Succeed? Writing, Rhetoric, and the Question of Failure, a self-described “wandering reflection” (223), Carr remarks on her growing sense that “the deep meaning of [failure] is too context-specific and contingent to hold scholarly significance” (224). As she notes, the chapters in that collection work in various ways to identify “failure’s systemic meaning” (224) as well as “its terministic emptiness” (225). The ambivalence that Carr identifies as she looks back on years of scholarship on failure is not dissimilar to the mutually muddled exigence that led us to this essay. Over several years of our collaboration, our frustrated attempts to pin down failure as a pedagogical concept had become a kind of leitmotif. We chose to frame our work as situating failure out of a sense that, as Carr suggests, the word was so overdetermined as to be almost meaningless. Although we first developed the language of weak and strong defenses in an effort to untangle our own thinking, we now see them less as discrete positions than as superficially opposed threads that may nevertheless easily intertwine with one another within a single book, article or assignment.

It’s worth saying that, to our minds, both defenses have their place. Whatever the neoliberal valences of failing forward or trying and trying again, surely rejecting the virtues of persistence, patience and determination throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Likewise, there’s a great deal to be accomplished by naming and embracing those failures that are imposed on us from outside by normative forces. The topoi of overcoming and resistance are each valuable, and each can be understood in terms of a given definition of failure. We hope the thinking we’ve shared in this essay invites teachers and scholars to be clear with themselves, their readers and their students about what sort of failure they mean to invoke at a given moment.

In the same afterword, Carr remarks that “despite being a champion for failure in my scholarly vita, I almost never bring it to the foreground with students” (225 n1). For her, failure is foremost a matter of negative affects, and she describes having “had a change of perspective about the ethics of conscripting students into those bad feelings” (226). It’s precisely this ethical problem that we mean to highlight through our heuristic’s focus on affect and duration. We would neither conscript our students into particular feelings, nor override those they bring to their work and relationships in the classroom. Our example, the Infodump assignment, foregrounds the idea of failure for students in order to make pedagogical use of these ambivalences. It asks students to think through failure’s context-specificity, contingency, even terministic emptiness as elements of the rhetorical situation in order to problematize conventional thinking about rhetorical success and failure. It says, in effect, that rhetorical failure is situational, that what counts as “good writing” (and therefore “bad writing”) is determined by convention and situation rather than some deterministic fiat intrinsic to the language. We argue that there’s pedagogical value to describing this as a failure, but only if the teacher has thought through and explained what they mean by “failure.” In this way, rather than either straightening out queer failure or defanging the potentially brutal consequences of failure, we hope that our heuristic offers ways of thinking about a failure in all its particularity.

Notes

[1] This definition paraphrases the Oxford English Dictionary, “risk, n. 1”; whether resorting to the stalwart term paper cliche of the dictionary definition constitutes intellectual risk on the part of two composition scholars is left as an exercise for the reader.

[2] See Carr and Micciche; Bastian; LaFrance and Corbett; and Pantelides.

[3] On links with corporate and Silicon Valley valorizations of failure, see Bastian 96.