Failure…
An essay…
Just a note: my resident editors are indisposed right now. One is falling asleep and the other is rehearsing for an upcoming performance. Please forgive my errors in this post.
As you all know, I teach graphic design at the university level. In fact I have been teaching college level classes for almost thirty years now. Adding to that the five I spent teaching junior high school students back home, I have spent almost all my life in an academic setting.
It turns out that teaching junior high was not much different than teaching college level classes. Though students are older, they are still young, some are very sheltered, others are more street savvy, and others are much more adult for their own good. Each of them says something about how they were brought up and what challenges they have encountered. They all seem to have one thing in common: even when it does not look like, they want to learn.
For the most part students want to go to college and get a degree. As time passes there seems to be less emphasis in their background on two fundamental skills: the ability to learn how to learn and the ability to learn to fail.
In my classes, a creative problem is presented much like a framework with parameters. The solutions are what they bring to the table for discussion. But many seem to feel ill equipped to break it down in chunks and get started. Parallel to that is their fear of failing. Students seem to have a need to get it perfect the first time around and there is a perception that experimentation is a burden. Frustration might set in and worse, defensive attitudes, and body language screams against iterating. There is little joy in the sandbox of experimentation.
I have always found that the best stage of a creative problem is the research and sketching. At that stage, anything is possible. Ideas come, go, and get reformatted in all types of combinations. Thoughts are tested, explored, discussed, and then discarded. I think that there should be a class solely focused on research and sketching where no final solutions are allowed. In fact, if final solutions are allowed they should only be the ones that failed. The best grade goes to the one who experiments and fails the most. A class like the one just described needs to be included in every art and design curriculum.
Several years ago, I taught a graduate seminar. In it, projects were due every week along with readings and discussions. One of the projects was to pick something they felt insecure about or had little knowledge. The objective was to fail at it. It had to be something they knew they would fail in a week. Some of the results were really interesting. One chose to pour concrete over her kitchen countertops. It was not a complete failure but it left some stains on it as a reminder that she was a novice. Others chose low key challenges but still there were things they knew little about. From this experience they went on to create their final piece which blew me away. One of them created a gigantic flying zombie which he tied to a pick up truck to see if he could make it fly. He shared the video of the experiment and it was incredible.
The ability to fail and bounce back is underrated in both academia and educational settings. Being that failing is a fact of life at every level, it should be something that is better integrated in education. There is much to learn not only personally from each failure, even when we get upset (and I do get upset), but also professionally. Perhaps the biggest gift we can give a student is the certainty that they have an innate ability to grow from failures and mistakes. That each failure is not a period at the end of the sentence but an ampersand. Because the story continues.
Love,
Alma