Ania Payne

“Quite honestly, we were not very pleased with much of the collaboration other than the idea of it and working with the professor. The students did not seem to want to be there, they were not engaged or motivated, communication was lacking, the students did the bare minimum of work (i.e. put content word for word on a document), provided a low-quality product, and never responded once it was submitted. Part of our discussion on how the project would work was to go through an editing and proofing process. The project was extra work for our staff and did not produce a usable piece of marketing material for us. I think the program is a fabulous idea, but the students did not put much effort into their participation.”

I sat in my office reading and rereading this disappointing response from my Professional Writing class’s nonprofit partner. It was my first attempt to bring community-based learning into my classroom, and I had sent out an anonymous survey to all the community partners we had worked with, hoping to get feedback about how to improve. For this project, my Professional Writing students had created marketing brochures for local nonprofits. Prior to reading the survey results, I thought that the partnerships had gone quite well. Directors from each of the nonprofits had visited our class and generally seemed pleased to be involved. The students seemed energized to work for local organizations, and I thought that I had designed the project so that each nonprofit’s unique requests were met.

However, only two of the six nonprofit organizations responded. One nonprofit partner had provided brief, positive feedback, but after reading the substantial critiques from the other organization, I was skeptical about the positive response. Clearly, at least one of these partnerships was failing in textbook ways: students did the bare minimum of work and lacked the maturity or commitment required to complete their projects (Cronley et al.), the project actually created more work for the nonprofit’s staff who were depending on students to deliver professional documents (Blouin and Perry), students stopped responding to the staff after the semester ended and did not fully complete the project (Gogan), and the nonprofit didn’t even receive a usable document at the end of the collaboration (Mathieu).

Even though the community partner who was unhappy with our collaboration had primarily critiqued the students in their response, I could scarcely avoid my share of the responsibility. A guiding principle of ethical university-community collaborations is that they be reciprocal, so both university and community partners benefit and are mutually transformed by the partnership (Dostilio et al). Ideally, community partners benefit from community-based learning projects by creating new and relevant knowledge or seeing an increase in organizational capacity from receiving students’ “free work” (Knight). For example, the community partner could receive “a new resource or deliverable, or something more abstract such as an improved method or approach to operations” (Knight 14). As Aimee Knight argues, a reciprocal partnership results in the community partner “gain[ing] from the collaboration new knowledge, resources, or capacity it ordinarily would not have” (14). Clearly one community partner had not received these expected outcomes, and if the students “did the bare minimum of work,” it seems unlikely that they grew intellectually either. To put it bluntly, the partnership was a total failure.

I was so absorbed in repeatedly reading the negative survey feedback that I even contemplated eliminating the community partnerships component from my Professional Writing course. If the collaboration was doing the community partner more harm than good, what was the point in continuing? Was it not a total waste of time for all concerned parties? It is in such moments of despair that we turn for clarity to prominent cultural figures who have thought long and hard about such matters. Samuel Beckett’s famous words from Westward Ho rang in my head: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” What could Beckett have meant by that? And what could a writing instructor possibly have to learn from that fragmentary bit of “advice”? Was it just a version of the commonplace wisdom “Try, try, try again, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again”—words that exhort us to never give up, accompanied by the assurance that if we persist in our endeavor, we will surely be able to convert our failure into success? But what, I wondered, would it mean to “convert” my class project failure into “success”? When Beckett speaks of “failing better,” is that just a convoluted way of saying “success”? If so, why not just say “success”? After all, how can one speak of “failing” without implicitly invoking its “success” twin? Hasn’t structuralist theory taught us that every word is intrinsically linked to—and therefore derives its meaning from—its opposite? Do success and failure not stand in an antonymic relation to each other so that one would make no sense without the other? Might it somehow be possible to uncouple what Anne Dalke has called “the success/failure complex” (99)—and if so, how? “Failure,” Gavin Jones has observed, “is not simply the inverse of success. It has its own story to tell” (16). But how can failure possibly tell “its own story” if it remains tethered to its “success” obverse? These were not matters I had previously given much thought to, but they were precisely the questions that gnawed at me as I sat staring at my own failure. One thing was for certain: I could hardly sidestep those questions anymore.

Reading those lines from my community partner was also my own intimate introduction to the heavy emotional freight carried by the word “failure.” Beckett’s words seemed to me to condense in one pithy formulation questions about binary relations in linguistics, the culture of celebrating “success” and disparaging “failure,” and—for me as an educator—to pose a profound pedagogical challenge as to how my classroom and the partner organization could together wrestle with these ideas through the medium of writing in a way that was both dialogic and dynamic, yet not overly laden with didacticism. A tall order to be sure—but what option did I have?

This paper is the practical-cum-theoretical story of how I tried to grapple with these questions at three levels: (1) at the level of the very concept of “failure”; (2) at the structural level of the practice of collaborative community writing; and (3) at the level of the emergent dynamic of the project. The three levels, although distinct, are intertwined in the sense that grasping the dynamic nature of the project also requires us to reflect on what exactly we mean by “failure,” and whether the project structure allows for the dynamic to gather its own momentum and lead us where it will. This last-mentioned feature—the self-determining aspect of the dynamic—turned out to be the most surprising outcome of the project: beginning with a (necessarily) limited norm within a more or less clearly delineated success/failure binary, the dynamic autonomously gained amplitude over the iterative cycles so that by the end of the third round of iterations, the presumed “end-goal” of the project had shifted from a narrow parametric specification to a much more holistic and socially expansive one. A salient aspect of this transformation was that it was not a gradual development; rather, it was as if all of a sudden, “project implementation” no longer occupied center-stage, and what seemed to enthuse both the students and the community partner was this midpoint shift in perspective. The theoretical question this raised in the context of our project was whether the concepts of “risk” and “failure” were adequate to account for this phenomenon. The discontinuity implied in the shift of perspective on how the entire situation was structured suggested that both concepts might need to be reconfigured in some way.

A distinction that is well established in the field of decision theory between “risk” and “uncertainty” might prove to be illuminating in this context. Both involve unknowns; however, “risk” deals with “known unknowns” that allow for some control over the probabilities of different outcomes, whereas “uncertainty” is characterized by “unknown unknowns” so that not even the possible outcomes may be known. Similarly, neither a univocal nor a polysemous interpretation of “failure” seemed to be adequate: the perspectival shift called for a reflexive concept of failure to account for its “double occurrence” as it were.

A significant take-away from the project experience was that if the culminating dynamic in community writing projects is to be truly autonomous—that is to say, emerging cross-dialogically from within the project structure—then both risk and failure need to be raised to the next power: “risk” needs to be elevated to “uncertainty” to open up the structure to the unanticipated, and “failure” needs to undergo a reflexive twist to break its tie with “success.” The instructor’s challenge, on the other hand, is how to relinquish control over the project’s “end product” while still retaining a structure that facilitates collaborative learning. Indeed, the cross-stakeholder multiple-revisions framework outlined below may be summarized as follows: instead of the heavy hand of the instructor or the community partner guiding the student along some pre-determined pathway, the student becomes an equal participant in the project’s dialogic space jointly constituted by exchanges between students, instructor, and community partner.

Locating Failure at the Community Scale

Initial reflections suggested a few immediate reasons for my failure: I had collaborated with six nonprofits, which was probably five more partnerships than I could realistically manage; I had not discussed some fundamental principles of ethical community-university collaboration with my students; and I had neglected to include specific time-bound steps during which students would edit, revise, and receive feedback on their drafts. Instead of abandoning community work entirely because of one dispiriting experience, I decided to completely “reset” my approach to community projects.

“Failures” come in all shapes and sizes, from individual setbacks to failures encompassing geopolitical, economic, sociocultural, and institutional breakdowns. Community writing operates somewhere in the middle, so to speak, where individual student writers, university structures, and nonprofit organizations cross paths. This scale is uniquely fraught because it is where institutional logics meet lived community realities: the community writing classroom becomes the site where students’ rhetorical decisions, the community partner’s organizational needs, and broader institutional pressures converge. Misalignments such as unclear communication, unusable deliverables, and inaccurate information may seem like minor irritants, but these are telltale symptoms of the underlying reasons why community partnerships are either able to accomplish their purpose or falter badly. Attending to failure at this community scale enables us to trace how writing mediates relationships, distributes power, and either reinforces or resists the institutional forces that shape nonprofit–university collaborations. By foregrounding this level of failure, my aim was to situate the project on the specific terrain where community writing unfolds—a terrain shaped by institutions but enacted by people, and therefore a site where failure becomes both pedagogically impactful and materially consequential. For community writing scholars, this is the zone where texts circulate outside of institutions, shape public narratives, and either strengthen or destabilize community relationships.

Community Engagement in the Professional Writing Classroom

Much contemporary scholarship highlights the benefits of technical and professional communication (TPC) students participating in community-based learning partnerships. For example, Brizee et al. argue that community-based learning is “one of the most effective ways of teaching TPC” (226). Their research demonstrates that “service-learning students’ experiences were more impactful than their nonservice-learning peers” in areas such as increased ability to engage with civic issues (243). Additionally, as McEachern points out, because of the “audience-driven nature of the work,” community-based learning can be a particularly valuable pedagogical approach for professional writing students or for courses teaching workplace preparedness since “not even the best-written case study or end-of-textbook-chapter-exercise can duplicate the rhetorical complexity that comes from a real human reader trying to solve a problem using a real document” (211).

Furthermore, incorporating community-based learning in the TPC classroom lets students put theory into practice and gain workplace skills while, ideally, producing free usable deliverables for community partners (McEachern). Integrating community-based learning into TPC courses also helps students make connections to the real world, further their understanding of audience and purpose, and develop deep learning with course materials (Soria and Weiner 189–190). Finally, more recent research from Heather Lindenman demonstrates that “the potential value of community engagement in writing courses is indisputable” because of a range of beneficial outcomes including:

deepen[ing] student investment… teach[ing] empathy and build[ing] meaningful relationships across difference… deepen[ing] a sense of commitment to civic engagement and provid[ing] practice in exercising civic responsibility… expand[ing] students’ conceptions of what writing is and does… [and] improv[ing] students’ over-all writing skills. (Lindenman 85).

When community-engaged projects are designed in a way that scaffolds students’ learning and weaves in periods of critical reflection throughout the course, such projects have the potential to provide significant benefits to both students and the community.

Risk and Failure in Community Work

Integrating community-based learning projects in an online, asynchronous TPC course places students in writing situations where their rhetorical choices, and the inevitable “failures” that accompany them, have the potential to impact community partners. To designate those moments more precisely, I frame early drafting as a series of “mini-failures,” temporary breakdowns to be addressed through revision and stakeholder feedback. This stance builds on Inoue’s notion of “productive failure” (346) as a catalyst for inquiry and future practice, and as a reminder that we are not pursuing “success” as an end-goal so much as cultivating conditions for more discerning failures across iterations. As Tennant, Commer, and Glavan argue, “Learning to value failure in community-based work is fundamental” (75)—and, I would add, even necessary to establishing long-term, reciprocal partnerships. While some university and community partners may be able to create successful reciprocal partnerships in their very first semester of collaboration, it has taken several years and many “failures” for the collaboration between my Professional Writing class and Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills, my longest community partner, to engender deep mutual reciprocity. Hartman (as cited in Shumake and Shah) acknowledges that although scholars have developed many theories of reciprocity, instructors who do community work may not find it so straightforward to successfully integrate those theories into their everyday classroom practices. Shumake and Shah also argue that “these theories may remain anemic because they are not grounded in practices that grow organically from doing community-based work” (11). Putting these theories into practice so that they are channeled toward deeper reciprocity requires testing new approaches for collaboration, reflecting on the inevitable failures, and continuously developing new practices for ethical campus-community collaboration.

Tenant, Commer, and Glavan reconceptualize failure in community literacy as a stimulus for inquiry, offering reflective strategies such as adaptive problem-solving, rivaling, and critical incident interviewing that help collaborators reinterpret miscommunications, redistribute agency, and bring to the surface previously unseen consequences of community work. Their model examines how contested definitions of success and the possibility of strained partnerships can leave student researchers feeling demoralized. In contrast, my framework builds failure directly into the workflow through multi-stage drafting, audience revision, and stakeholder testing so that “failure” functions not only as something to reinterpret retrospectively but as a structured, forward-looking, and public-facing occasion for sustained reciprocal collaboration. Furthermore, while Commer et al. theorize intellectual risk-taking as a deliberative practice oriented toward anticipating stakes and making choices under conditions of uncertainty, this paper shifts focus to what happens when failure and its possible forms cannot be fully anticipated in advance. Rather than foregrounding deliberation prior to risk-taking, I examine how failure operates across iterative, cross-stakeholder revision cycles to reshape what counts as success, usability, and reciprocity in community writing partnerships. In community-engaged writing, failure does not simply follow risk; it is distributed across iterative encounters with institutional and community stakeholders, producing shifts in norms that are only recognizable after the fact.

In the following sections I describe a partnership between my online asynchronous Professional Writing class and Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills, outlining a framework in which students revise their texts across multiple cycles and a variety of stakeholders, and in doing so, continuously redefine “success” as a moving target rather than a fixed outcome. While in agreement with Paul Feigenbaum’s claim that reducing students’ fear of failure can support deeper civic engagement (423), my model differs from his in one crucial respect: Feigenbaum treats “generative failure” as a function of intrinsic motivation and individual autonomy within a closed classroom environment whereas my approach locates failure at the public level of collaborative community writing where students, community partners, and institutional structures keep crossing paths and cross-fertilizing each other’s efforts—with both material and relational consequences. Rather than framing failure as an inward-facing catalyst that can be harnessed for personal growth, my model makes failure operational and public-facing through cross-stakeholder testing, iterative multi-audience revision, and documented uptake in failure-reflection memos. In the process, failure becomes a dynamic reciprocity-driven design principle that reshapes students’ rhetorical dispositions, enabling a community-centered approach that moves beyond the consultant-client relationship.

Writing with Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills

After realizing that I could not hope to manage six community partnerships in one semester, I narrowed my scope down to one partnership with Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills, a Habitat affiliate located in Manhattan, Kansas, a semi-rural town nestled in the Flint Hills, adjacent to a large army base. This project is part of an upper-level online, asynchronous TPC course which I teach at a large Midwest land-grant university. The students, senior business majors, often enroll reluctantly, dreading this required English course, even though the learning objectives include preparing them to be successful workplace communicators.

Within the scope of our community writing project, the type of deliverable that students produce for Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills changes each semester depending on the organization’s needs. Previous classes have written brochures promoting Habitat’s programs, developed website templates, created infographics about affordable housing in our community, and written profile articles spotlighting Habitat’s homeowners. To start the project, at the very beginning of the semester Habitat’s Development Manager provides my class with a list of desired outcomes such as the ones mentioned above. To begin, the class uses a discussion board to discuss expectations for ethical community partnerships, where I emphasize that both the class and the community partner should benefit from the collaboration (Dostilio et al., Green). For students, this could mean growing as writers and as civic-minded individuals, or that they add a public-facing project to their resume, or that they make fruitful connections with our local businesses. For the nonprofit partner, “benefits” could mean that the organization saved time and resources by receiving usable student-created documents, or that the staff gained new disciplinary knowledge, or that they strengthened their relationship with the university, or perhaps recruited new employees or volunteers.

We also use a discussion board to reflect on how “failure” in community partnerships manifests differently than in typical academic settings. Whereas traditional academic failure might present as a low grade, failure in a community setting could occur in multiple ways: students develop a savior complex (Cushman) or create more work and confusion for community partners than they do help (Mathieu) or leave a project before completing the work (Gogan). In community work, failure could have a detrimental effect on community partners if students are unable to secure the required resources or complete anticipated tasks, and these failures could potentially damage or even end relationships with community partners (Rumsey et al.). However, to mitigate the potential harms, I forewarn students that they should expect to encounter setbacks throughout the project.

Designing for Failure in Community-Based Learning Projects

To begin, students self-select into groups of three and assume a role (for example project manager, copyeditor, designer, etc.). As Capineri observes, writing in groups can provide students with a deeper understanding of the writing process, lead to increased confidence, help them anticipate how they might transfer their acquired skills to future projects, and enable them to better appreciate collaborative writing in public contexts. For their most recent project, students created three forms of marketing collateral for Habitat for Humanity of the Flint Hills. Of the three documents, the technical overview offered the most detailed discussion of a topic. For example, a group explaining the concept of land trust included primary and secondary sources in their document to offer readers a detailed, research-backed discussion of the topic. Next, students remixed information about the community land trust into a brochure for distribution at local events. The brochure required an eye-catching design, less formal language, and more images and graphics. Finally, students created a social media post to introduce the concept of community land trusts to Habitat’s Facebook and Instagram followers. The post—an image and a short block of text—linked to the technical overview. The sequencing of these documents matters because creating a technical overview, then a brochure, then a social media post requires students to re-compose knowledge at different levels of abstraction and audience proximity. Across those genres, failure is not an incidental by-product but rather the very condition that prompts a re-articulation of purpose, audience, and evidence with each pass. During my latest iteration of the project, which lasted roughly 8 weeks, I collected data through students’ written reflection memos, their revision drafts, and their email exchanges with the staff at Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills.

Take One: The Draft That Will Fail

The Draft That Will Fail, our first, low‑stakes classroom circulation, makes this expectation concrete. By naming the draft as one that will fail, I decouple evaluation from correctness and invite engaging with unfamiliar concepts (e.g. net‑zero housing). Instead of fixating on correctness, students practice seeing failure as diagnostic, not definitional. The aim is to transform paralysis (“public‑facing stakes are terrifying”) into curiosity (“what did the breakdown teach us about readers we don’t yet know?”). “Failure” functions here as an ethic of iteration rather than a promise of eventual triumph, freeing students to test counterintuitive choices and to let new criteria for success emerge. Students then exchange feedback across groups and compose failure‑reflection memos that (1) name what failed, (2) interpret what the discomfort revealed about audience and purpose, and (3) translate those insights into explicit revision plans. These memos are artifact‑tracked bridges between attempted moves and subsequent actions.

Take Two: Revising Toward Community Expectations

After peer review, students submit a revised draft and a second failure-reflection memo to me. I read their drafts as a bridge between peers and Habitat’s staff, as someone who will assign a grade, but who is not the arbiter of their public usability worth. My feedback therefore responds to stakeholder-contingent criteria (accuracy, organizational voice, genre fit, accessibility), preparing students for the next audience. West-Puckett and Moeggenberg show how making breakdowns anticipatable can make failure rewarding (108); I extend that stance by requiring students to formalize how a specific failure (for example, a misaligned pronoun frame) will be corrected in ways that survive migration across all artifacts in the set, not just in the single document where it was first noticed. Furthermore, students were encouraged to treat these “mini-failures” as occasions for reframing and redesign by translating those moments into artifact-tracked decisions via failure-reflection memos. In this way, the memo becomes not just a record of what went wrong but an integral part of a process for tracing how students’ standards shift as their texts encounter increasingly public forms of uptake.

Take Three: Emergent Criteria Through Stakeholder Testing

Finally, students shared their most “polished” drafts—not “The Draft That Will Fail” but “Take Three”—with Habitat staff members. Because staff members had limited amounts of time to comment, I told students to ask the staff to identify three specific higher-order concerns. Students drafted review questions that Habitat’s staff would be uniquely positioned to address—questions such as how donors would respond to their messaging, or whether processes were being explained thoroughly enough for potential new homeowners to understand, or any other questions that prompted the staff member to consider the specific ways their documents were meeting or not meeting expectations for Habitat’s diverse audiences.

Unfortunately, several “Take Three” drafts still exhibited sentence-and structural-level issues stemming from students’ omission of earlier revision recommendations. For example, several groups failed to address issues with the use of pronouns, so Habitat’s Development Manager had to repeat what I had already told students—that they should be writing from the point of view of the organization (using “we/our” pronouns rather than “they/them”) when describing Habitat’s work. On a different occasion, the Development Manager told a group, “Overall, you use a lot of fluff words, which makes it hard to understand the point of this overview.” The Development Manager also had to address lower-order concerns that I had hoped would not be an issue by the third revision, telling one group, “I think you should just read this again, carefully, and make sure everything you say adds to your message” and telling another group, “Watch out for being repetitive. It makes your message harder to understand.” In one case, Habitat’s Homeowner Services Coordinator pointed out that a group of students had included factually wrong information about a homeowner’s family member, saying, “In the article about the ‘little girl’ Anny (shown in dark green in the photo), she is actually an adult (age 30) with developmental delays.” The Homeowner Services Coordinator also noted how students had sometimes gotten basic information wrong, stating, “Also, something to note—my family and I are local to Manhattan. We’re from Wichita, KS and moved here to MHK (Manhattan, Kansas) over five years ago. It’s important, especially when speaking about the new homeowners, to provide accurate information.”

Habitat’s staff also identified issues with focus and development. As the Development Manager wrote to one group, “This is very detailed about Ogden. It feels like I am supposed to be learning about Ogden, KS geography and not The Good Steward Community Trust (the intended topic of the document).” She also identified multiple instances where students were not referring to the organization correctly, telling students repeatedly to use the expression, “Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills” in accordance with Habitat International’s standard nomenclature. However, about half of the projects were noticeably more polished by the third draft, earning comments such as “good in-depth information” and “your information sounds good” from Habitat’s staff, though several still displayed sentence- and structural-level issues that should have been addressed.

To conclude this revision cycle, students compose a third reflection memo and describe how they plan to implement all staff suggestions (especially on accuracy and nomenclature) before re‑submission. “Failure” thus becomes the process through which the project’s purpose is clarified by the community organization rather than “for” it. Students must incorporate the community partner’s suggestions across all their documents so “success” becomes ready usability and uptake by the organization, not instructor approval.

When Failure Rewrites the Norm: Emergent Criteria in Community Writing

The end of this revision sequence held the biggest surprise for me: not only did we have deliverables for the staff, I also unexpectedly found myself face-to-face with a transformed understanding of the project’s pedagogic underpinnings. In the initial framing, the students acted as consultants implementing a project for our community partner client. However, after multiple rounds of revisions, it became evident that the boundary had blurred: the consultant-client relationship between my class and Habitat’s staff passed parameters of a “partnership” and constituted a new joint community. Through the iterative revisions, the students and Habitat’s staff began acting not as two distinct entities but as members of the same community, working together to inform the public on complex topics such as community land trusts, net-zero housing, and other innovative approaches to housing. Becoming a joint community also unexpectedly altered the project’s temporal framework: no longer time-bound and course-bound, it became part of a long-term citizens’ vision of the community that even encompassed future generations.

In the last round of reflection memos, students began to make connections between the immediate “housing affordability problem” and other related issues facing the community such as lack of education, lack of employable skills, lack of economic opportunities, lack of affordable and quality childcare, and excessive dependence on the army base as the sole significant employer. Some even expressed fears about the town’s long-term survivability if things continued this way. I couldn’t help reflecting on how we had started the project with a narrowly specified objective (e.g. “produce an informative and attractive brochure for Habitat”) but had, within three rounds of revisions, collectively found ourselves on the threshold of a much broader exploratory arena. Within the space of three rounds, a dynamic had unwittingly been set in motion that I could not control, but could not possibly ignore either. Utilizing the project’s cross-stakeholder multiple-revisions-and-reflection-memos framework, students navigated their way to a more interconnected view of what they had initially perceived as a straightforward “housing affordability problem.” I couldn’t help musing whether arriving at such a holistic perspective on social issues was not in fact the ultimate destination of every project. And that the fundamental question from a pedagogic standpoint is how we as instructors and project-guides can enable each student to arrive at an integrated perspective on their topic in their own singular way by tapping into their own unique experiences and their own vision of the future.

Far from turning all gloom and doom because of their realization of the complexity of “the housing problem,” their altered perception that “housing affordability” was one aspect of a larger picture seemed to energize them while also opening up other possible avenues for cooperation—in other courses, with other organizations, with other departments at the university (as was already happening with the Architecture Department). This overall broadening of perspective in turn served as a stimulus for students to consider becoming more engaged in civic activities, with some even evincing an interest in steering their careers that way. For many, this was the first time they had experienced this scale of collaboration. One student was so motivated that he began volunteering at Habitat’s ReStore. Another student used the contacts they made to get their Construction Science club involved with volunteering on Habitat’s home builds. And yet another student used the course’s connections to involve their fraternity in planning a golf tournament fundraiser for Habitat. In all these ways, the partnership produced outcomes far beyond the project’s original student learning objectives.

When Failure Fails: Toward a Reflexive Theory of Community Writing

So much for the practical-operational aspects and the unexpected outcome of the project exceeding the initial goals presumed by a consultant-client relationship frame. But how are we to understand this unanticipated outcome theoretically? This seemed to me a crucial question because it was the shift in perspective as to what constitutes “failure” that gave rise to the new sense of shared community. As students reflected on their moments of mini-failures through iterative drafting stages and wrote evolving failure-reflection memos, “failure” began to manifest not as something that only befalls individuals and organizations (giving rise to shame, defeatism, hopelessness etc.) but also as a concept that could turn back self-referentially on the idea of failure itself. We have by now become used to the idea that concepts are not univocal carriers bearing a single message, that they are in fact polysemous with multiple meanings, but the idea that a concept redoubling upon itself can often be illuminating is less well known. Might I need just such a reflexive instance of the concept of “failure”—the failure of failure—to account for the unexpected turn the project had taken? After all, was it not because the initial norm of success (e.g. “produce a polished brochure”)—and its concomitant idea of “failure”—could not satisfactorily account for the “housing crisis” that students had been impelled to move beyond their starting conception of “failure” towards the larger set of social factors which underlay the immediate issue of “housing affordability”? And for that to occur, did the initial narrowly circumscribed norm of “failure” not have to fail first so that a more expansive norm could emerge from within? It seemed to me that only then could previous failures be revealed as having been “failures” because the initial norm of what “failure” meant was itself revealed to be a failed one. If so, then we are dealing with two senses of “failure” that stand at different levels: one defined within a preconceived notion of “failure” as being occasioned by a “falling short” of a predetermined target and the other as a failure of the notion of a predetermined target itself—which subsequently opens up a space for the emergence of a more expansive and democratic ideal towards which all parties to the effort contribute in their own singular way.

What emerges as a result is not a mere “improvement” toward the original target but a shift in the target itself—along with a transformed sense of what counts as usability, uptake, reciprocity, etc. In the context of community writing, this means that even as the starting norm is dispensed with during the collaborative writing process, a different species of norm emerges midstream as a retroactive effect of the “failure of failure.” In this way, we get the emergence of a new ideal that is not beholden to the starting norm. This is by no means a guaranteed outcome; nonetheless, there can be no movement beyond the initial norm if such a wager is not made. A question that immediately arises here is whether such a wager can still be termed “risk,” or do we need something stronger? My own experience with this course points to answering the latter question in the affirmative.

Following a distinction well established in the field of decision theory, a situation of “risk” involves roughly estimable probabilities about possible outcomes (we could call this “known unknowns”), whereas what we encounter in community writing projects are “unknown unknowns”—including not-yet-knowable outcomes. A project that genuinely “embraces failure” is characterized by uncertainty rather than risk: it can be framed, it can be scaffolded, it can be ethically supported, but its possible outcome cannot be predicted. From a pedagogical perspective, building uncertainty into project design right from the start is therefore crucial: it is what allows for surprise (new ideals, new audiences, new uses, new constraints) to emerge as a “byproduct” of the project. Community writing collaborations allow students, faculty, and organizational partners to jointly discover under conditions of uncertainty what it means for a public-facing project to be a “success” or “failure.” By the end of the third cycle of our last project, all three parties came to realize that “success” and “failure” were not the fixed markers they had initially assumed them to be, but rather are moving targets that continually evolve in response to the changing conditions of learning throughout the project. In their failure-reflection memos students continually reflected on the various phases they passed through, and this in turn becomes a meta-learning exercise. That is to say, through this process of continuous exchange students realize that they had initially approached the project with preconceived standards set by their instructor or community partner. Over multiple iterations, they begin to see that learning is not about “meeting a target” but rather is a process of exploration during which they come to recognize the limits of their starting point and subsequently discover for themselves a more expansive ideal. This discovery process turns learning into an adventure that engages students more effectively than externally imposed norms.

My perspective also changes: the main point of our community partnership is no longer to “deliver a product to the client” (although submitting a decent deliverable is still helps maintain a reciprocal relationship); rather, the emphasis shifts to the design of the project—in particular, to building enough openness into the project from the start so as to make surprise discoveries possible. Incorporating uncertainty in this way as an integral part of project design means leaving open the possibility that initial “deviations” from a pre-set norm gradually gain enough amplitude that they culminate in what Williams has called an “emergent formation” (133–134): a transformation of the norm itself.

My multi-stage design extends writing studies conversations on failure by moving beyond merely instrumentalizing failure as an opportunity for reflection and operationalizing it; rather, “failure” is approached with the awareness that it shape-shifts continually as students’ projects move through different levels of stakeholder testing. Such an approach refuses the tidy success/failure binary and offers a different lens to attend to how norms themselves can shift in the course of practice. Failure is no longer a detour on the way to correctness but a prime mover that restructures what counts as “success” in situated, public-facing writing.

A central design challenge that I faced was that students and community partners had culturally imbibed standard linear tropes of “overcoming failure”—tropes such as persistence, determination, doggedness etc. I wanted them, instead, to recognize that unanticipatable outcomes were integral to the internal dynamic of the project and that there was no guarantee a salutary outcome would necessarily come about. This was disconcerting to many. Despite the unease many students felt at the open-endedness of the final outcome, maintaining the project’s unpredictability was crucial. Any prior anticipation of the final destination would bias the process by already circumscribing the outcome within the presupposed norm, even if such a norm is not explicitly articulated. At the same time, “surprise” cannot be pre-programmed into the process either, or else it’s no surprise at all. And yet, for surprise to be recognized as surprise, one cannot altogether dispense with a frame of some sort: a minimum of structure is therefore necessary. Indeed, as an instructor this was the most challenging aspect of the project: how to collectively set aside any preconceptions about the outcome and let the dynamics of the project take us where it will.

Conclusion

At the project’s end, several students mentioned that they eagerly monitored the social media pages of Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills, hopeful that their work would be publicly acknowledged. Shared projects became a point of pride, and students often reposted them as evidence of meaningful, community-engaged learning. However, not all student groups saw their work featured. In several cases, this was because they did not fully incorporate the revision feedback provided by Habitat’s staff. Towards the end of the semester, I encouraged students to treat the project not as a standard academic assignment, written for a grade and forgotten, but as a living document, something they could keep refining beyond the classroom so as to continuously create and recreate a flexible deliverable.

Only one group took up this invitation, continuing to revise their technical overview in collaboration with the Development Manager even after final grades were submitted. By undertaking this fourth, self-directed revision, they transformed what might have been considered a failed attempt—“failed” not in terms of their grade, but in its lack of uptake by the community partner—into one of the most impactful projects of the semester. As Erin Brock Carlson reminds us, “public-facing projects should extend beyond a final deliverable, offering opportunities for feedback and revision as we build sustainable community partnerships” (176). Although this particular group did not receive the highest grade in the class, they exemplified a deeper form of “success” that was rooted in a commitment to continued community engagement. Their willingness to fully accept “failure” allowed them to ultimately produce a deliverable that was not only usable but highly valued by Habitat’s staff.

Despite structured feedback loops across three rounds of revision, only four of the six student projects were deemed publishable by the staff. This outcome suggests that while our community writing framework has grown increasingly rigorous and responsive, it is not yet fully reciprocal. Still, there has been definite progress. The satisfactory conclusion of the latest iteration took me back to that day when I read, with sinking heart, the feedback to my first ever attempt at incorporating community-based learning into a writing course. Back then, I thought community-based learning partnerships succeeded or failed in toto. I now realize that my own idea of what “failure” meant had to first fail so that I could move on to a more nuanced idea of what constitutes a norm. As I continue to revise this framework in collaboration with students and community partners, I remain committed to embracing failure as a learning process waystation—for myself, for my students, and for our community partner. With each iteration, I aim not for “perfection” but for deeper reciprocity, and I remain hopeful that each “failure” will edge us closer to more ethical and effective community engagement. “Success,” in this way of thinking, is not the crossing of a pre-determined finish line but a (dis)continuous process of evolution that is inextricably intertwined with “failure.”

So finally, what about the motto with which we began: Samuel Beckett’s “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”? Could Beckett’s words also not be read along the lines we have traced in this paper: the first “Fail” as a failure within the pre-established parameters of a norm, the second “Fail” as failure of the norm itself? Through the community writing projects in my classes, I hope to pass on to my students—and to the community organizations we work with—some of the open-ended spirit of “redoubled failure” that is encapsulated in Beckett’s famous words.