Justin Mando and Alexis Teagarden Personal Experience with Risk/Failure Two major writing projects framed our academic year: editing this special issue and writing a first-round grant proposal. Both focused on risk and failure scholarship; both drew on familiar academic genres. But the experience of writing the two could not have…

Ania Payne Abstract Recent scholarship in writing studies has called for embracing generative failure as a productive element of learning, yet community writing complicates this move because failure carries material consequences for partners beyond the classroom. This article examines failure as a designed feature in a community-engaged professional writing collaboration…

Cynthia Miecznikowski Abstract The study of failure has been ongoing in the fields of educational and motivational psychology for decades. Twenty-first-century scholarship in teaching and learning affords not only more nuanced understandings about what failure means but also more questions about the ways in which failure is seen as necessary,…

Meghan Hancock Abstract This article examines how faculty across disciplines define the term “risk-taking” when it is applied to a writing context—both in their own writing and their students’ writing. Data was gathered through surveys and 39 virtual interviews with faculty across the country, asking participants questions like, “when you…