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 been more different. The grant tasked us with persuading a major foundation that our proposed research project, budgeted at $400,000, deserved further consideration. We had no prior interaction with the foundation; our previous year’s (much smaller) grant application had failed, and this opportunity emerged unexpectedly and with a tight deadline. Our special issue, on the other hand, asked us to frame manuscripts we’ve considered in multiple rounds of review, for a project we actively sought out, and one that had a timeline increased by a year. We were nearly certain we would fail to win the grant approval, and nearly certain our editors’ intro would be published.

The situations were very different. And so were the writing experiences. We wrote the grant with a song in our hearts. We considered our modest research plans—a carry over from the former failed project and tossed them for a much larger project. We experimented with alternative openings and chose the most outlandish one. We shared drafts regularly with colleagues and tinkered so often that a new draft would be done before peers could finish what we sent.

For this piece, we often sat in silence, staring at a blank page. While three years of work has sharpened our skills, we still found ourselves, in April 2026, with a file called “Editors’ introduction” and nothing written in it. We had our special issue announcement, which called on Composition scholars and practitioners to “bridge conversations between intellectual risk and failure” and asked “How might we continue to theorize, and what might we together generate as best practices in response to the potentials (good and ill) attached to teaching writing through risk and failure?” And we had responsive manuscripts to discuss. We also had genre knowledge; we knew what editors’ introductions often said. But what did we want to say? And how should we introduce risk and failure: a conventional approach seemed ill-fitting, but more creative options just seemed too… risky.

Facing this howling uncertainty, we did what we have done for over a decade. We just started to talk. We invented options, starting with unconventional approaches like a two-column introduction with one column representing the conventional and the other something unusual and risky. We considered whether we should argue with the contributors or just synthesize the varying positions. We discussed audio recording our struggle so that we might start our article as a dialogue. We wondered about labor-based grading incentives. We asked ourselves what Alexis’s students had asked: is working really hard the same as taking a risk? We thought that it might work to consider what Yoda would say about this. We kept our focus at first on what seemed to us the riskiest approaches that we could take. But as we discussed, we kept returning to the authors who have contributed to this issue and how much we did not want to let them down. We also could not help but talk about the current geopolitical situation, our feelings of instability, and even of the relative importance of this work when just days before our president had threatened nuclear holocaust upon another nation.

Deliberate (adj)/Deliberate (v)

In other words, regardless of the difference in writing situation, we aimed to deliberate in order to be deliberate. It was vital to us in both cases to discuss, to question, to compare, and to challenge one another. We could not have just sat down to write without the conversation that preceded it. For us, to describe the writing process, to do writing well and ethically, means to intentionally invent (from reflection, study, and speculation) copious options, then assess the stakes of each potential choice for ourselves and, as much as possible, our larger communities. These are the critical features of our theory of intellectual risk-taking, which prioritizes an intersubjective deliberative process around risks and stakes over the actual taking of risks (Commer et al.), a theory itself that took form out of a survey on intellectual risk-taking we created given our unease with underexamined calls to make students into risk-takers (Teagarden et al.).

When drafting our grant proposal, our ideas flowed, and so we deliberately interjected pauses. We sought feedback from other grant-writers, pushed ourselves to consider alternatives, imagined safer, less amusing routes. We exercised deliberation both in constant conversation and in measured decision-making. We did the same when writing this introduction, though here we had to push ourselves to meet, to confront a blank page, to navigate competing stakes: ours as scholars of risk versus as editors responsible to the contributors versus as contributors to field’s conversations.

Our own expectations also confounded us. When we proposed this special issue, we believed that the best way to approach writing instruction was likely a theoretical model that included both risk and failure. To our read, previous work in Composition and Writing Studies tended to prioritize either failure or risk-taking, not consider them together (Teagarden et al. 2024). Our special issue could help the field braid together these parallel lines of scholarship. Therefore, we were deliberate in our call, asking contributors to “bridge” the concepts or position them to “interact.”

The manuscripts we received, however, resisted the charge to theorize failure and risk into a shared pedagogical frame. It turns out that our call to draw conclusions had been too hasty; the energy in the field remains focused on deliberating about failure and risk. Rather than accepting our original proposal that risk and failure should be theorized together, in this special issue, readers will encounter a variety of ways to define, value, align, and demarcate academic risks and failures.

But what consistently emerges across all the readings is the value of continued deliberation—through reflection and collaboration—and especially among a community of scholars who all value innovative writing pedagogy. As researchers on intellectual risk-taking, our own inquiry has shifted from how do we reward risk-taking? to how do we foster good deliberation about writing risks? Now, as editors, we find ourselves making the same shift: rather than pin down failure and risk-taking’s place in writing pedagogy, this special issue raises up examples of pedagogical deliberation that risk and failure can provoke. In the process of editing this special issue we have learned that perhaps bridging these concepts is not our ultimate goal. (Here again, the grant proposal project offers a mirrored-image; there we proposed to further study how students and instructors define intellectual risk taking in writing, with the assumption we will need to rethink our own views given new data).

In short what readers will find across all manuscripts is evidence that knowledge-, meaning-, and decision-making should be deliberate, deliberative processes. Comforted by the special issue’s interest in deliberate work over risky ventures, we decided to avoid overtly confounding reader expectations. An intentionally risky introduction was wrong, we thought. And so, as willing as we were to take risks with a grant proposal, we prepared to submit a conventional introduction to our special issue, with the biggest risk was of being forgettable.

But then we decided to tell the Council of Writing Program Administrators they forgot an entire realm of writing knowledge.

Let’s step back.

Going Beyond the WPA Outcomes 4.0

At the same time our editorial drafting began in earnest, the Council of Writing Program Administrators released the WPA Outcomes Statement 4.0, with a new framework of Five Knowledge Domains. When we first encountered the new statement, we thought it could bring a kairotic spark to our conventional introduction; we would hook our special issue articles to the new organizing framework. We saw Domain 5: Composing Processes as a perfect place to add risk and failure pedagogy. We started drafting some potential claims about the special issue articles to show how they develop this domain, for example: X of X articles concur with Domain 5: that writing instructors seek out ways to get students to not just write but rewrite. We returned to the articles to back up our assumptions with actual text.

But when we reread the finalized manuscripts, we found they could not be so neatly contained. We had, after all, assumed submitted manuscripts would offer risk and failure theories that complemented or rivaled our composing process-focused work which schematizes intellectual risks as topoi (positional, formal, framing, ethical, and evaluative risks). We argue these topoi can serve as sites for inventing and deliberating about available risks that emerge in the writing process.

Several articles do illustrate how intellectual risk and failure complement the composing processes domain, though authors often disagree on how. Miecznikowski reflects on her first-year composition pedagogy and how one of her primary teaching tasks is to encourage students, long accustomed to certainty and often lacking the resources to weather failure’s material consequences, to accept that writing involves risk-taking. Payne, in contrast, uses her teaching experience to challenge the view that risk has an important role in writing pedagogy, instead arguing how embracing failure, rather than risk, can form the basis of a community-learning-based course. Like Miecznikowski, but focusing on graduate student writers, Pfannenstiel and Foels similarly diagnose risk-aversion as an impediment to their graduate students’ learning. They implement a risk-failure exercise cycle with graduate students in an early cross-disciplinary support program to encourage the students to take on the risks inherent to graduate-level writing by embracing vulnerability. Luther et al. use risk as an organizing concept on the programmatic scale by shaping an M.A. in Writing around a DIY ethos that utilizes concepts like “making do” and “tinkering” to build students’ comfort with the uncertainty of both graduate studies and the life of a writer. Both this piece and Pfannenstiel and Foels emphasize how working in visual modes can encourage graduate students to work through negative affective states and take writing-based intellectual risks. Even though we see a clear fit for these articles within Domain 5: Composing Process, they connect that process to material conditions and technologies that mediate their students’ experiences, i.e. Domain 4 and the issues raised in Domain 2: Conventions and Language.

But many pieces go beyond the specifics of composing. In their program profile centered on community-based learning, Lauer and Tobeck focus on reflective practices that support core disciplinary concepts like the dynamism of genres but that also help students develop metacognitive skills that lead to rhetorical awareness and the ability to reframe failure. The interconnection of risk and failure with reflection also undergirds the faculty development model Taczak puts forward, where she argues that faculty can purposefully reflect on failure in order to engender a willingness to take intellectual risks. In their attention to metacognition and reflection as inquiry, these two pieces operationalize important elements described in Domain 3: Critical Reading and Thinking.

Three other articles step beyond specific classrooms and programs to survey the field: Phillips and Applegarth through a literature review, Sharp-Hoskins and Banazek via vernacular teacher-talk, and Hancock with instructor survey data; each puts forward new ways of understanding the place of failure and risk in writing pedagogy, coming to different conclusions about the pedagogical potentials of these concepts. Phillips and Applegarth theorize the pedagogical uses of failure while questioning intellectual risk’s place in the classroom. Sharp-Hoskins and Banazek dissociate conceptual partners of risk in order to question the necessity of risk-taking in writing pedagogy, arguing that “reward,” “experimentation,” and “spontaneity” can be cultivated without the “unnerving” invocation of risk. On the other hand, Hancock finds faculty have much to say about intellectual risk-taking but rarely extend their commentary to failure. Here risk and failure are analyzed as key concepts in writing, an approach suggesting that defining risk and failure can operate as a form of rhetorical knowledge (Domain 1).

Further definitional work appears in Adịọha et al., who rival the narrow academic tradition of risk/failure/success with the abundance possible in “plural productivities.” In their series of reflections, the five authors demonstrate how reflecting on painful or nebulous past experiences can transform them into affirming moments of productivity, when such work is pluralized beyond the constraints of formal academic success. Alongside Adịọha et al., Banville et al. explore graduate student job-seeking, again challenging conventional views of failure and success. Their study analyzes how the emotional consequences of risk is managed among doctoral students on the job market, noting how socially mediated support groups dissipate once success/failure move from potential to known outcomes. Like “plural productivities” encourages graduate students to step out of risk/failure frame, Banville et al. work to reframe risk and failure by redefining what counts as a job-market success. Both raise questions that speak to Rhetorical knowledge (Domain 1) as well as Material Conditions and Technologies (Domain 4).

In sum, the theorizing and operationalizing of both risk and failure extend beyond composing processes and flow at least into the domains of Conventions and Language, Critical Reading and Thinking, and Material Conditions and Technologies. Given our own theory of intellectual risk-taking is thoroughly grounded in rhetorical principles we also make ready connection to the first domain “Rhetorical knowledge.”

When we realized we could not contain the special issue articles in any of the potential domains, we turned to the three “Cross-Category Knowledge Domains” that do not fit a single domain and that may influence two or more of the others. Among these are Accessibility and Disability, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and Genre. And there we found ourselves and the work of the special issue authors: Intellectual Risk and Failure, we argue, are another kind of cross-category knowledge domain. Positioned this way, intellectual risk and failure are a current students and instructors can purposefully catch or unintentionally get caught up in, where they must grapple with the affective as well as cognitive dimensions of writing.

An Area to Explore for the WPA Outcomes 5.0 Statement (Whenever it Should Emerge)

What Closes and Opens/What We Do Not Know

A feeling that writers and teachers of writing know well is that of standing on the edge of a precipice with questions swirling around. What do we do? Where do we go? How will this land? How can we safely land, once over this cliff? Facing such questions, it can be tempting to turn away from uncertainty, to return to the safety of what we already know. For us, even just airing our own deliberative process in the editors’ opening—an act of intersubjective deliberation—has helped us build, (perhaps) a good piece, but certainly courage. That courage is not a blind willingness to take the leap; it is a deliberate choice to do what we believe is good, not only for ourselves but for everyone writing and reading this special issue, and despite potential costs. In Cicero’s words “a spirit which is ready to face danger, but is driven by selfish desire rather than the common benefit should be called not courage, but audacity” (26). Courage thus supports an ethical, eyes-wide inquiry into shifting spaces. And that is what brings us to you.

In this era of easily-generated final papers, our discipline, in fact, stands on solid ground because we have long been developing approaches to the iterative process of writing. Whether we look to failure or risk as the concept to animate that iterative process is hardly a minor point in course design. And you could read the pieces in this special issue as suggesting there is a big pedagogical split between how we handle failure and how we handle risk. But both failure and intellectual risk have the power to engage students in ways that go beyond teaching a stepwise process that feels formulaic and can also be easily reproduced by any LLM chat-bot. What our issue’s articles valorize is immersing oneself and one’s students in the process of reflection, consideration of stakes, engagement with an audience, and—perhaps most importantly—connection to a writer’s own personal sense of risk and failure. None of that is worth much if it isn’t done deliberately.

That is, when we hear writing instructors talk about how they get (or fail to get) students to write, we understand them as deliberating about engagement strategies. The split between whether instructors should emphasize risk or failure or something else, is, we think less of a pedagogical rift than it is a rhetorical dispute over what will best reach our classroom audiences. Rather than force a theoretical construct uniting risk and failure as an essential domain, we come away from this issue viewing risk and failure (and plural productivities) as complementary classroom frameworks, as available means of persuading students to do the work of rewriting (a draft, a project, even an identity), and as a cross-domain form of knowledge that, like genre, helps inform practice. In this way, intellectual risk and failure can function as pedagogical topoi; they are different places from which to invent classwork that motivates students to write and rewrite, to deliberate with themselves and others. As our field involves a vast array of student and faculty audiences, we need copious means of persuasion. Our own pedagogies and the students in our classrooms can help us determine if they need to be talked out of failure or talked into risk. Or maybe vice-versa.

We’ve been studying risk-taking for over a decade, and every year (every day even) our writing choices vary; sometimes we have embraced risk and failure; other times we worked hard to avoid both. We were bold and joyful when writing our grant, even or perhaps because the odds weren’t in our favor. We were conventional in style, modest in scope with this introduction, until we weren’t. If we succeed in either of this year’s projects, it will be, we believe, not because of a successful formula we codified but because of our deliberative process, with each other and with colleagues—in person and in print. We hope, in turn, this special issue provides you a space for invention and deliberation and also celebration, for what the authors here have done and will inspire others to do.

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the editorial team at Composition Forum for giving us the space to take risks, theoretical and editorial. We are also grateful to each of the special issue’s authors, who have been as generous with their thinking as they have been patient with our timeline. We thankfully acknowledge Carolyn Commer and Ana Cooke for their significant contributions to the development of our ideas on intellectual risk and failure.

The articles published in this special issue went through anonymous peer reviewing at both the proposal and full manuscript stage. Reviewer feedback was essential in shaping the issue, and we thank them for all their work:

Jacob Babb	Jocelyn Bartkevicius	Zachary Beare
Heather Bastian	Lauren Brentnell	Allison Carr
Gissell Del Castillo	Maria Conti Maravillas	Stephen J. Corbett
Paul Feigenbaum	Christine Garcia	Tyler Gillespie
Mary Glavan	Kaitlin Clinnin	Anthony Lince
Shiva Mainaly	Cyndi Miecznikowski	Chris Morris
Abby Orenstein	Josh Rea	Gwen Gray Schwartz
Karen Tellez-Chaires	Amanda Tennant	Stephanie West-Puckett

Some manuscript proposers also served as proposal reviewers, but no selected author served as a manuscript reviewer.

We also thank our student fact-checker Mitchell Garner, who reviewed many of the manuscripts for accuracy. Reflecting on his experience, Garner offered advice to potential fact-checkers: “find a nice quiet place to focus and get the job done. My place was the school library. Some days I was here for hours because time flies by, but I don’t regret it at all. The research these professors are doing is a great thing, and I was honored to be a part of it.”

Editorial work was supported, in part, by the 2024 University Scholars/Research Fellows Program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.