Visualizing the Power and Privilege of Failure in Higher Education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/isotl609Keywords:
higher education, power, privilege, visualization, educational research, SoTL, critical race theory, feminismAbstract
Learning from failure is a core component to education, however it is not often deliberately taught in university courses. In addition, while the rhetoric around taking risks, embracing failure, and bouncing back is pervasive in higher education, the corresponding structural supports are lacking. The purpose of the current work is to explore ways we can visualize and illustrate the power and privilege involved with embracing and learning from failure in the context of higher education. We offer three approaches to visualizing the same set of research data exploring student and instructor experiences of failure. The first figure is structured using a Venn diagram, the second uses a mobius strip, and the third draws on both puzzle imagery and the structure of a kernmantle rope to offer a more complex rendition of power and privilege in higher education. These illustrations are intended to serve as introductory guides to this topic. This work emphasizes that power is diffuse and mutable, and we underscore the critical importance of recognizing that each person will experience power and privilege differently in different circumstances. This exploration of illustrative concepts is a place to start theorizing about how students and instructors experience, resist, or wield power as they navigate academic institutions and engage with failure. We note that each instance of struggle, failure, or recovery exhibits specific configurations of power as multiple vectors contribute more or less strongly to the situation. The exact topography of power will change as different people, areas of the institution, or social policies and values enter the equation.
Downloads
References
Althusser, L. (2014). On the reproduction of late capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Verso.
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pmerantz (Eds.) & FABBS Foundation, Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.
Creswell, J. W. (2012). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th ed.).Pearson.
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. The MIT Press.
Dörk, M., Collins, C., Feng, P., & Carpendale, S. (2013). Critical InfoVis: Exploring the politics of visualization. Changing Perspectives: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2189–2198. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468739.
Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner.
Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Strategies for learning from failure. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure.
Feigenbaum, P. (2021). Telling students it’s O.K. to fail, but showing them it isn’t: Dissonant paradigms of failure in higher education. Teaching & Learning Inquiry 9(1), 13–26. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.9.1.3
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction. Vintage.
Hallmark, T. (2018). When “failure is OK” is not OK. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 64(23), A44.
Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction 26(3), 379–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370000802212669
Kapur, M. (2015). Learning from productive failure. Learning: Research and Practice, 1(1), 51–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23735082.2015.1002195
Kapur, M. (2016). Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning. Educational Psychologist 51(2), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1155457
Kapur, M., & Kinzer, C. K. (2009). Productive failure in CSCL groups. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(1), 21–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-008-9059-z
Kordich Hall, D., & Pearson, J. (2005). Resilience—Giving children the skills to bounce back. Journal of Education and Health, 23(1), 12–15.
Kundu, A. (2014). Backtalk: Grit, overemphasized; agency, overlooked. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(1), 80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721714547870
Loo, C. M., & Rolison, G. (1986). Alienation of ethnic minority students at a predominantly White university. The Journal of Higher Education, 57(1), 58–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.1986.11778749
Nixon, S. A. (2019). The coin model of privilege and critical allyship: Implications for health. BMC Public Health, 19(1637), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7884-9
Robertson, S., & Dundes, L. (2017). Anger matters: Black female student alienation at predominantly White institutions. Race and Pedagogy Journal: Teaching and Learning for Justice, 2(2). https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/rpj/vol2/iss2/3
Verschelden, C. (2017). Bandwidth recovery: Helping students reclaim cognitive resources lost to poverty, racism, and social marginalization. Stylus.
Walker, C., Gleaves, A., & Grey, J. (2006). Can students within higher education learn to be resilient and, educationally speaking, does it matter? Educational Studies, 32(3), 251–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055690600631184
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Jennifer Ross, Pooja Dey, Esther Baffour, Yasmin Abdellatiff, Emily Tjan, Dan Guadagnolo, Nicole Laliberte, Fiona Rawle

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.