Cynthia Miecznikowski

“To writing especially,” Allison Carr notes, “failure is integral” (Failure Is Not an Option 76). Yet, as every composition teacher knows well, this understanding may be the most formidable threshold concept our students are likely to confront. Cultural narratives, both tragic and comic, teach us from the time we are children that failure is unacceptable, that it is to be avoided, that it is “not an option” (Failure is Not an Option 76), and some of us learn “the hard way” that failure can do long-term damage to our sense of self, even our relationships with others. The contrary notion that we can learn from failure is a hard sell, especially when the stakes are high, as they tend to be among First-Year Composition (FYC) students, especially those attending open-access institutions like the one where I have taught for twenty years. While I believe my students’ success as writers in my courses and others will depend on their willingness to take intellectual risks, I know that many if not most have already undertaken personal, social, and financial risks just to show up in my classes. That they will need to earn at least a C to complete our courses successfully is more likely to inspire fear than trust. To be willing to fail is a lot to ask of them.

First-year writing students are risk averse for good reason. They come to us after years of literacy education governed by standardized and, increasingly, scripted curricula, high-stakes testing, and a culture of certainty both in and beyond the classroom. Their reading assignments have always been a search for “the author’s main idea,” which they know their teachers know at the start. Their own writing has begun with a “thesis statement” and an outline. The conventions of Standard Edited American English were not taught directly but were expected to materialize in their grammar and style. Our students have been conditioned to believe that everything knowable is already known and that their teachers are the gatekeepers. It is no wonder, then, they are so afraid of being wrong that they are reluctant to begin a college-level reading or writing assignment without a tried-and-true, well-rehearsed template (like “the five-paragraph essay”) to guide them (see Blomstedt 2024). They want to know what we their instructors “want” and “how long” an essay “has to be” because those are the criteria they have learned matter; their previous 13 years or so of schooling taught them that meeting those criteria and pleasing their teachers are strategies for success.

Yet, in such disciplines as engineering, art, architecture, and industrial design, problem-based and collaborative learning pedagogies foster students’ tolerance for uncertainty and confusion by cultivating their willingness to take “creative risks” without the risk of a low grade or even failure. In “The Becoming of a Designer: An Affective Pedagogical Approach to Modelling and Scaffolding Risk-Taking,” Lisa Grocott et al. report on a university-school partnership project developed with the goal of changing the attitudes of students and their teachers toward “creative risk-taking” (100). The project was a response to a perceived need for design pedagogy to acknowledge and address “affective studio-based pedagogical experiences” to “close the gap” between pedagogical and assessment practices in design studio environments (109). They write:

Where we previously thought of design education as about making things, we are now asked how we prepare design graduates for making sense, making possible, making right and making happen (Grocott and Sosa 2018). This expanded notion of “making” through practice requires us to explore how we might continue to explicitly teach design students the ability to become comfortable with uncertainty and embrace risk-taking in ways that align with contemporary design practice. … As design celebrates its capacity to foster creative risk-taking, … one challenge is that the project-based assignment continues to privilege and assess the formal, conceptual, and functional aspects of a tangible outcome. (100)

As a result, in new learning situations, they concluded, “it was easier for students to revert to old mental models and practices” (108) rather than think creatively. They saw this outcome as a reminder that “we are always in a state of becoming and the becoming of a designer does not happen in one studio or one degree” (108).

The same can be said of composition courses in which students resort to formulaic writing even as we encourage them to see writing as a process that is recursive and meaning as in-the-making, circuitous and novel. More important than the specific “activities, exercises, or tools” employed in a design class, Grocott et al. suggest, is “a commitment to taking risks as an educator” in order to foster “a learning culture where teachers and students alike can be open to vulnerability and interrogating existing mental models” (108). For writing instructors, this can mean modeling in our pedagogical practices the kinds of creative thinking we want to encourage in our students—a variation of the “mentor-model” pedagogy characteristic of ancient rhetoricians (Hedengren 199)—to show our students how we, too, grapple with uncertainty as we write, how we make decisions and change our minds, revealing our own messy work-in-progress.

One risk I take in my FYC classes is to compose “in real-time” on the whiteboard, talking through options and decisions my students suggest about how to start a summary of an article we just read or begin analyzing or responding to it as a way to make the process of thinking into writing visible and to allay their fear of “making mistakes” before they even begin to write. So, I show them that I get stuck, too, that I pause to think (in this case, out loud) about what to write next or what I have already written. I might cross out a word or phrase and replace it with another—or not. I might move sentences around and explain why. For years, I hadn’t questioned whether students understood that the point of these improvisations is to encourage them to write without fears of failing.

Recently, though, I have begun to wonder how many students left a class doubting my expertise. And on those occasions when a colleague or the Department Chair observed my teaching, did they wonder whether I was prepared for class? Or worse, did they question my competence? Having recognized my own vulnerability in those moments, I understand better, I think, how writing might “feel” for most of my students, and I am even more convinced that, if I am going to persuade them to accept uncertainty and vulnerability as requisite conditions for writing, I may need to assess their writing differently throughout the process.

Although some of my students apologize for “bad” writing and others deny having written at all, I know they wrote in high school, sometimes successfully, and they continue to write all the time in digital spaces of their choosing. They wrote—and continue to write—with agency and intrinsic motivation for themselves and for real and imagined audiences of peers, the very people they will need to communicate with for the rest of their lives, as neighbors, friends, coworkers, and citizens about what matters to them, to get things done and make things happen in their worlds. But “official forms of writing” about somebody else’s ideas “that are accepted for graded product in our schools” do not matter beyond those classrooms, and will soon be forgotten if they haven’t been already—and our students know this (Pencil). Years of schooling have taught my students that their academic performances were just that, and too many (especially those for whom American English is not their first language) have been taught that writing is not something they can—or might ever—do well. (And now, generative AI offers a false sense of security for those who believe they can’t write or think “correctly.”) No wonder then that so many students are not sure why, after more than a decade of school-based writing, they need to enroll in FYC. They must feel either penalized or mystified by the requirement.

If my students are asking why, I am asking how. How to encourage students to embrace the uncertainty—and the potential for failure—that writing inevitably entails. How to engage both their curiosity and prior knowledge to solve rhetorical “problems.” How to develop their critical, creative, and original thinking even in their research-based academic writing. And how to foster intentionality and support the self-agency among students who believe that all writing has a predetermined form and follows scripts they have been practicing for too many years already.

1. Rhetorics of Failure as Productive

The study of failure—its causes and consequences—has been ongoing in the fields of educational and motivational psychology for decades. In the 21st century, scholarship in teaching and learning has offered not only more nuanced understandings about what failure means but also more questions about the ways in which failure has been seen as necessary, even indispensable, for learning. (See Thoune, for example, on the notion that failure is a precondition for teaching writing.) In recent years, the conversation has included studies of the costs of failure (i.e., psychological, financial, social, institutional, cultural) and how, though it seems counter-intuitive, procrastination can be a way to avoid it, if only temporarily (Duru et al.). Proponents of “productive failure” and “desirable difficulties” have argued the benefits of creative risk-taking, especially in STEM disciplines, where problem-based pedagogies and collaborative learning are well established. (See, for example, Abercrombie et al., Alhadabi et al., Carlson and Fishbach, Cullen and Oppenheimer, Daly et al., Holmes et al., Kapur and Bielaczyc, Kapur and Rommel, Tekmen-Araci, Sawyer, and Taneri et al.)

The field of Composition offers specific complications to the role of failure in learning. As Carr and others have noted, defining failure is difficult if not impossible, in part because our cultural understanding of failure is so inherently contradictory. Privately, failure is an unfortunate, even traumatic outcome at the end of a significant endeavor, yet, publicly, we laud failure as a learning opportunity, a new beginning despite another uncertain outcome. Carr describes failure as metonymic—implicating not only what we did or didn’t do but also who we are. We don’t just “feel” failure (In Support); we “embody” it (Johnson and Sheehan 127). Failure—and failing—stop us in our tracks. Starting over may not be possible financially or otherwise, or we might feel permanently inadequate to the task. The self-doubt and shame failure triggers must be resolved to move forward.

Failing “forward” or “better” or “productively,” requires accepting uncertainty and liminality as normative, non-threatening, and failure as not only possible but inevitable from the beginning. This stands in contrast to learning environments “where knowledge is assumed to be highly certain and strongly dictated by the curriculum,” like those our first-year college students know well (Hübner and Pfost). While, as education scholar R. Keith Sawyer notes, business scholarship is replete with “case studies of failures that eventually contributed to successful innovation,” for first-year college students, the prospect of failure instills palpable fear. Yet, according to the Framework for Success, curiosity and creativity, which dwell in uncertainty, are among the “habits of mind”—”ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical”—deemed “crucial for all college-level learners” (Council et al. 4). In short, the Framework implies, embracing uncertainty is a precondition for successful college-level writing, but what that means is ill-defined.

Creativity has been defined as “one’s belief in their capability to successfully perform difficult tasks and [their] ability to see them as challenges rather than threats” (Choi et al.). Creativity, then, is a powerful disposition that presumes self-confidence, even courage. According to the Framework, creativity can be cultivated by “exploring questions, topics, and ideas that are new” and inventing alternate ways of investigating, representing, and evaluating the results of those explorations (4–5), approaches to learning and knowing unfamiliar to most first-year college students.

Curiosity, “the desire to know more about the world,” listed first among the Framework’s “habits of mind,” is aligned with inquiry-driven “research” planned with “relevant authentic audiences” in mind for purposes of presenting “findings in writing to multiple audiences inside and outside school” (4). Curiosity, then, is both open-ended and circumscribed by rhetorical exigencies that require both expertise and imagination. Yet, for many if not most first-year writers, curiosity and creativity gave way long ago to quantifiable learning outcomes for assessing what they know, not what they are capable of.

In the introduction to the special issue on failure in the journal Instructional Science, Manu Kapur and Nikol Rummel, two of the most prolific scholars on the topic, describe ideal teaching as beginning with an “invention” or “generation” phase followed by “consolidation” or “instruction” through which the instructor “compare[s] and contrast[s] the student-generated [but inadequate] solutions” before introducing “the canonical concept” that is the learning goal (Kapur and Rummel 646). This delayed direct instruction is conducive to what the researchers call “productive failure” as a precondition for deep, long-term learning. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, productive failure is preferable to “unproductive success,” what Kapur later called “the illusion of learning” (Kapur 290). Unproductive success results from “teaching methods that rely largely on drill-and-practice or rote memorization,” enabling learners to perform “memory tasks or carry[ ] out problem-solving procedures without a commensurable understanding of what it is they are doing” (290). Unproductive success comes from all-night cramming before an exam or memorizing definitions of concepts. A third category in Kapur’s taxonomy, “unproductive failure,” results from applying formulaic frameworks (like the five-paragraph essay or “they say/I say” templates, even rubrics) to new or challenging learning—or writing—situations (290). Both unproductive failure and unproductive success are illusions of learning because neither cultivates deep understanding which makes long-term learning and knowledge-transfer possible.

More empirical studies by Kapur and others confirmed over time that students at all levels of education learn better when direct instruction is postponed and they are asked first to solve a learning problem collaboratively (Kapur 292). These numerous studies over the past ten years showed that engaging students’ intellectual, creative, and metacognitive capacities prior to instruction not only resulted in learning but made the learning stick. In one recent study, college students of art and architectural design proved especially amenable to the kinds of challenges beyond their “zone of proximal development” productive failure pedagogies entail. In 2019, R. Keith Sawyer adapted productive failure methodology to his design pedagogy which he described as “constructivist and learner focused.” Citing studies of “design thinking,” Sawyer described the process in words compatible with the process of writing: “‘iterative, nonlinear,… exploratory,… involving dead ends or failures, and with ‘unexpected discoveries along the way,’” adding:

Rather than a sudden moment of insight that drives creativity, small ideas occur frequently as single moments in a longer process, and although these small ideas sometimes fail, those failures nonetheless drive the process forward toward eventual success. (2)

Sawyer, Grocott et al., and others have maintained that this pedagogy supports long-term learning and knowledge transfer because it makes possible “a deeper conceptual understanding of the material, when compared to learners who completed well-structured problems without encountering failure” (Sawyer 2). Ideally, it would seem, summoning relevant, prior knowledge first enables students to make connections between what they know already and what they need to know, a motivating exigency for learning. Of course, Sawyer concedes, “Not all failures are beneficial to learning; student failure could indicate a lack of understanding or learning or could be a sign of poor assignment design or ineffective teaching” (2). In other words, productive failure doesn’t just happen but requires understanding what students know already and what they need to learn and, possibly, unlearn. Designing courses and assignments that require students to imagine their own purposes and audiences can help them see where previous notions about and attitudes toward writing fall short.

2. Reimagining Failure—and Writing—as Ill-Structured Problems

Although productive failure’s success has not shown much promise outside STEM disciplines (Nachtigall et al.), as Sawyer’s scenario suggests, the approach would seem highly compatible with writing and writing instruction because the kinds of writing students are typically assigned in FYC can be described as ill-structured problems—those without definitive answers that require self-agency in choosing among “rhetorical tradeoffs” (Teagarden et al. 131). Moreover, while many first-year writing students are uncomfortable with uncertainty, when instructors provide templates, simplistic formulas, or even exemplary assignments prematurely, they are likely to circumvent the very dispositions students need to cultivate if they are to expand their capacity for learning about what it means to write. But persuading students who are risk-averse—students who fear failure for a combination of personal, social, financial, and emotional reasons and who do not yet know what they are capable of as writers—to try something new is more likely to result in cognitive overload than motivation. Failure can thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And “learning from failure” or “failing forward” can be so costly emotionally as well as socially, academically, and financially, the notion of “productive failure” is likely to be viewed as a privilege unavailable to students who are working multiple jobs to pay for tuition or to qualify for financial aid or who are supported by academic or athletic scholarships they cannot afford to lose (e.g., Feigenbaum, Telling Students; Hallmark; French; Johnson and Sheehan). For many students, having to retake a composition course to attain “a C or better” is an additional burden and a barrier to their persistence to graduation as well as a formidable challenge. Moreover, as Paul Feigenbaum has pointed out, “Even as many writing teachers embrace failure,… the institution remains focused on success,” resulting in irreconcilable “tensions between autonomy-supportive pedagogical values and controlling institutional imperatives” (Welcome 410). These issues manifest as tensions between grades and expectations, tensions Feigenbaum and others find embedded in our profession’s Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. In an educational and cultural climate “focused on success,” productive failure and risk-taking are inefficient, and because our students know this intuitively, they may resist or resent both.

In “Frameworks for Failure,” Daniel Gross and Jonathan Alexander indict CWPA, NCTE, and NWP for championing “positive psychology” over civic and democratic ethics as motivations for college-level writing in The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. The authors commend the document’s unquantifiable criteria for circumventing the “testing mania” that has pervaded American education since the start of the 21st century (277). They criticize, however, the document’s alignment of success with positive emotions, rendering negative such exigencies for writing as “unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and even failure” which, the authors argue, “might serve as entry points to critique the power structures and normalizing discourses that direct our lives and efforts along certain lines” (288). Negative emotions, they argue, can prompt authentic, personal as well as democratic and civic responses among “people who experience the world differently,” people for whom societal norms have set them up for failure rather than success (287). This omission, the authors contend, amounts to “erasure of our discipline’s social turn” in the 1960s as manifested in expressivist pedagogies like that of Peter Elbow, whose Writing Without Teachers (1973) rejected “the academic apparatus of fear and shame in order to write” (284).

In response to the failings of the Framework, Gross and Alexander propose a “framework for failure” that acknowledges “how failure and negative emotions are an ineradicable and sometimes crucial component of our educational lives” (288). Their alternative framework would overturn the success-failure dichotomy, prompting teachers of writing to interrogate our own assumptions, personal and professional, about what failure in writing is and means, how failure is embedded in the process of writing, and how best to manage and cope with it.

Another approach to confronting writing (and the teaching of writing) as an ill-structured problem—one with no clear “answer,” only possible choices neither positive nor negative except in response to their kairotic constraints—arises in Alexis Teagarden et al.’s study of risk-taking and writing instruction. They offer a “rhetorical approach to intellectual risk-taking” in the composition classroom (131) and call for further research into “what we as writing instructors can do to actually help students take those risks” (132)—a call they later answered with a rhetorical pedagogy for intellectual risk-taking in composition, to which I will return shortly.

3.Toward a New Rhetoric of—and Beyond—Failure

Initially, the call from scholars like Carr, Teagarden et al., and Gross and Alexander for writing instructors to approach failure proactively led me back to one of the first depictions of failure as rhetorical that I know of for insights into how an understanding of failure might provide a segue for creative or intellectual problem-solving. In Coping with Failure, David Payne proposed redefining failure as “a rhetorical problem” (147) which all inquiry and knowledge construction seek to solve:

Even in their scientific quests, contemporary philosophy and psychology would have little value for us were it not for the possibility of human error and inadequacy. Not even the “hard sciences” are truly independent of the rhetorical theme of failure. The possibilities and consequences of failure are typical reasons given for responding to crises, arguing for the significance of research questions and projects, and justifying funding and other support. The social sciences, of course, specifically target human failure as their principal domain of interest and inquiry. In all of these circumstances and more, rhetorical tasks must be carried out in defining, analyzing, and evaluating alternative ways of understanding and resolving what are experienced in life as inadequacies. (147–148)

For Payne, science exists to study and understand failure for the purpose of repairing it in the present and avoiding it in the future. The pursuit of knowledge is, ultimately, an ongoing series of failures in search of success. In other words, failure and the prospect of failure are not simply inextricable from teaching and learning, they are the exigencies for both.

Perhaps more importantly, Payne argues what failure means personally and socially is a rhetorical construct, too, that can and should be deconstructed. However, as we know, the immediate consequences of failure are often debilitating, psychologically and socially, emotional rather than rational, and so not particularly conducive to analysis and interpretation. “Simply put,” Carr writes, “failure isolates” (In Support of Failure), thus depriving us of resources for coping. In “Failure Is Not an Option,” Carr exposes the archetypal thinking which, especially in Composition, makes failure so devastating:

Failure in writing betrays dullness of mind, smallness of imagination. The failed writer—the one who cannot learn to write well (which is to say, according to accepted conventions of good writing)—is discounted as dim, unprepared, non-serious, wacky, or weird, distracted, behind. (76)

Imposed from the outside by societal expectations, failure triggers feelings of inadequacy and shame, especially among those who fear others’ judgments or fear letting others down. When student writers internalize a view of themselves as a failure, when they believe they have failed not only themselves but others, they not only feel remorse, even guilt, but their image of themselves suffers, too, and memories of previous failures can exacerbate those responses. Payne suggests, however, that “failure, identity, and guilt are all matters that can be negotiated and redefined” (37) if the causes and circumstances of failure can be identified and made visible as rhetorical constructs.

In their recent study of German university students, researchers Vanessa Hübner and Maximilian Pfost investigated how students’ emotions, their aversion to making mistakes, and their willingness to accept increasingly complex or challenging tasks (not their demographic profiles, as is often assumed) predicted students’ tolerance for academic risk and the attendant possibility of failure. Researchers Ryan W. Carlson and Ayelet Fishbach questioned the very possibility of learning from failure in educational contexts because of failure’s multivalence. Their description captures a few reasons failure is an “ill-structured” problem:

Failures come in many shapes and sizes—ranging from minor social blunders to flunking out of college. They are also undoubtedly subjective—the same grade may be a success for one student and a failure for another, depending on their goals. (160)

Decades after Payne’s rhetorical framework for coping with failure, Carlson and Fishbach’s research revealed that failure responses are often more emotional than cognitive and can occur “not just after actual failures… but also when anticipating failure” (160), hence the fear of failure that keeps students from progressing toward their academic goals and keeps student writers from writing. Contrary to the cliché that we learn from our failures, Carlson and Fishbach’s work explains how just the fear of failure interferes with learning when, for example, students stop attending classes or procrastinate on assignments (162). Although providing a brief respite from anxiety through “short-term emotion regulation,” avoiding anticipated failure only compounds feelings of shame and guilt for having let others down as well, especially one’s sources of support including, for many first-year writing students, their instructors (Duru et al. 2903; see also Ajjawi et al. 195, Parlade and Karayigit 200–201).

For Payne, communication is the “remedy or therapy for failure” through the complementary discourses of “consolation”—meant to yield “a new perspective on the loss” (42) and “compensation”—meant to reveal possibilities for “repairing the failure and… starting over again toward one’s original goal” or a new one (43). In the context of first-year writing, peer and instructor responses to drafts and conversations about preliminary and incremental writing can serve both purposes, especially when all strive to understand the writer’s rhetorical choices. When the deficit rhetoric of failure is replaced over time by trust in the circuitous and recursive nature of writing as an ongoing process of making meaning, student writers can learn through practice to expect and trust their ideas to take shape through the process of writing. But for all kinds of reasons, failure in Composition is especially acute and more likely to be felt post-evaluation, when strategies for coping are needed most.

Payne’s framework for coping with failure proposes solutions to the multifaceted consequences of failure “with the goal of restoring a sense of unity and harmony” (41), both personal and social. Payne locates the consequences or “problem” of failure in “three dialectical pairs of topoi… [that] elucidate the symbolic and dialectical ways of conceiving and resolving failure” (44–45). These dialectical pairs, which operate concurrently—”self-society, past-future, and spiritual-material,” serve as interpretive lenses through which experiences of failure and affective responses to failure can be identified and examined (44). Consolation needs to happen in conversation with others and promotes reflection on failure that makes reinterpreting, renaming, and owning the experience possible. Compensation looks beyond a failure experience to reimagine and articulate alternative ways of coping with the experience and managing future responses to similar situations (45). Consolation is meant to lead to an understanding of the causes of failure (including one’s own decisions and actions). Compensation, the complement to consolation, is meant to yield interpretive control over the experience through the sense of agency and exigency consolation makes possible.

Like so much contemporary scholarship, Payne’s work framed responses to failure through the lens of loss rather than error, but in the contexts of writing and writing instruction, error and loss can be difficult to distinguish. The kinds of grief that can come from failure may well characterize a student’s response to failure on an assignment or in a course as a loss. To the extent novice writers especially associate their writing with their identity, such loss and the grief it brings can feel profound. Consolation, then, must begin with defining the failure and identifying its immediate as well as root causes (Payne 53). Helping students to understand failure as a problem in this way—as external to them—can help repair its damage to their sense of self, making it possible for them to move forward without needing to extract a life-lesson from the experience.

Compensation comes from understanding the experience in a new and empowering way making failure less devastating, less threatening, less scary in the future. Although Payne’s work predates and lies outside of the discourse on failure in Composition Studies, his conceptual framework offers a pedagogy for coping with failure that can help writing instructors help first-year writing students respond to real and perceived failures in restorative and future-oriented ways.

While in a therapeutic setting, a “failure narrative” is likely to be volunteered, in the context of FYC, a student who incurs failure is likely to be consumed by the experience. Although responses to academic failures are not sequential (like stages of grief were once presumed to be), they can be progressive. Carr’s description of the sense of failure she felt as a new doctoral student illustrates the profound impact failure can have, perhaps especially on a writer searching for meaning amid uncertainty: “I felt sick to my stomach, hot, dizzy. My mouth tasted like pennies. I tried to puke but cried instead.… I became overwhelmed by doubt, dread, and shame, muttering to myself over and over, ‘I don’t have a backup plan.’” (In Support). FYC writing students who have never failed before, those who have felt like failure personified in previous English courses, first-generation and non-traditional students burdened by self-doubt and financial risk—all are likely to respond to failure differently, personally if not viscerally, and in self-damaging ways, and we their instructors might never know unless we adopt and practice a pedagogy of failure.

In “Unspeakable Failures,” Kelly Myers, much like Gross and Alexander, takes issue with resilience rhetorics that depict failure as the opposite of success and the fault of an individual who can “rebound” if only they summon their “personal strength and work ethic” (57). Myers reminds us that first-year and, especially, first-generation students face “myriad social inequities, stereotypes, and conditions [often systemic] that prevent people from ‘failing forward’” no matter how much they may strive (53). Myers’ answer to the problem of failure is that writing instructors adopt a practice of “stopping in the middle of failure” before leaping (or encouraging someone else to leap) resiliently ahead to allow for critiques of “the stories we are telling ourselves about how and why we and others failed” (57). Such “stopping” makes space for consolatory conversations that can offer insights into the causes of failure and feelings of shame that our students may be trying to hide and hide from by missing assignment deadlines and classes (57). According to Myers:

Working in the middle of failure, turning the negative emotion that we experience and witness, can reveal new questions and complexities. Such reorientation can also help us rethink the source of the emotion—particularly with a feeling like shame that is not just produced within, but is also imposed upon, [individual] bodies. (58)

Myers’ “stopping” to interrogate failure is more introspective than Payne’s therapeutic response, but the outcomes are, if not similar, complementary. Both are ways of approaching and “talking about failure critically” and “hold[ing] it still long enough to make meaning of it” (Carr, Afterword 225). Postponing failure or halting its downward spiral by learning to pause to consider alternatives and to anticipate and weigh their consequences can help first-year students cultivate agency over ill-structured problems like those assigned in first-year writing courses.

In Counterpoint: Why Not Intellectual Risk?, Teagarden et al. argue that intellectual risk-taking can be a viable pedagogy for responding to failure in first-year writing proactively: “When we discuss the potential for failure, we are really talking about risk, and when we locate this risk in the classroom and relate it to learning goals, we arrive at intellectual risk” (49). In other words, intellectual risks are possibilities for failure (56). In this conception of risk-taking, opportunities for intellectual risks can be imagined and critiqued in the pause that “stopping in the middle of failure” affords. The authors describe how in the composition classroom rhetorical knowledge can help students identify and respond to the potential failures of possible rhetorical choices in deliberate, reflective pauses throughout a writing assignment. At the same time, Payne’s framework for consolation and compensation can serve as a strategy for understanding (consolation) and coping with (compensation) the limits and limitations of rhetorical knowledge students in FYC are beginning to develop. Citing their previous work, Teagarden et al. define intellectual risk as “an option with stakes attached” that are meaningful to the student:

Intellectual risk-taking, we argued, can only occur when a student faces a choice among at least two options related to learning, where at least one of the options has consequences, ones that the student—not the instructor, not the audience—recognizes as meaningful. Students must then weigh the potential positive outcomes against the negative ones, such as being perceived as less competent, receiving public criticism, or losing an aspect of one’s social identity. (55)

These are, of course, very high stakes, especially for first-year writers, and can become barriers to their ability to write and to learn. However, teaching writing rhetorically, the authors argue, can empower student writers to imagine their options, their “available means of persuasion,” and choose which risks to take. Teaching writing rhetorically can thus help FYC students learn to distance themselves from anticipated failures by empowering them to pause “in the middle” throughout their writing process to consider rhetorical choices and their consequences so that, even when those choices aren’t “successful,” they will know that failure is not inevitable, that there are other choices possible, and that this is what it means to write and to learn to respond to rhetorical situations authentically with authentic audiences in mind.

A conception of risk and failure as both subject-specific and socio-cultural throws into high relief the potential for injustice that can occur when student writers are expected or encouraged to take undefined risks in their writing that might push them beyond their comfort zones or demand more time or research or prior knowledge than they have available. Many of my FYC students live with an ever-shifting hierarchy of values. Most are without material safety nets, though they may have the emotional support of family and friends, even former teachers. Those who are first-generation college students are just as likely to serve as safety nets for others—children, parents, grandparents, spouses, friends—who rely on them for support when they themselves “fail.” My students’ education may be their priority when the semester begins, but then something happens that is beyond their control, and they can fail in any number of ways both in and beyond the classroom. A car accident might mean not getting to classes or to work, which can snowball into more failure. A parent’s illness or change in work schedule might mean caring for younger siblings or an elderly family member until other arrangements can be made. These and other unanticipated, even traumatic events, compounded by “the hidden curriculum,” may interfere with my students’ ability to make it to class or to learn on any given day. It’s important, even incumbent upon me, to give them the space and the time to pause, the opportunity to reflect and respond critically rather than personally and emotionally, when failures happen.

Rhetorical education can help students like mine both own and disown their failures and empower them to write through them though not necessarily about them. Rhetorical awareness can demystify the conditions and possibilities for failure—and success—in FYC and help students develop predispositions to critical thinking and metacognition which can help them solve all kinds of ill-structured problems. Supporting students’ self-agency by teaching them to discover their available options and practice those predispositions in our composition classes can help first-year writers begin to develop and learn to trust their ability to make deliberate choices while understanding in advance that any option they might choose presents some level of risk, but that certainty is not the goal because inquiry is always ongoing. To paraphrase Grocott et al., such agency is not likely to develop in a single course experience, but with practice over time, our students can “become” more confident writers who are far less vulnerable to their fears of failure and far more willing and prepared to take the risks they decide are worth it.