Failure Pedagogies : Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail

Can we all learn from failure equally? Failure Pedagogies examines the ways failure is often appropriated to advantage those most likely to be insulated from the risks associated with pursuing it as a creative strategy._Contributors ask questions that examine what happens when failures do not necessarily lead to progress or innovation: How is risk distributed? For whom is failure "safe" and why? For whom is failure a real end rather than an opening to generative possibilities? To address these questions, we focus largely on pedagogical settings―classrooms, universities, and the conventions that reign there―but also confi gure pedagogy as a broad cultural practice that teaches acceptable and unacceptable forms of resistance, subversion, and risk. Contributors focus on a range of topics, including teaching and failure, language failures, fake news, disaster response failures, academic racism, sexual harassment and gender bias, queer failure, intersectionality and infertility activism, and institutional failures to imagine disabled bodies. Failure Pedagogies will be of interest to scholars, students, and teachers of writing, rhetoric, and popular culture.

Allison D. Carr, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Coe College (IA), earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 2014. Her work has appeared in Composition Forum, Pedagogy, Computers & Composition Online, and multiple edited volumes.

Laura R. Micciche, Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1999. She has published three books on writing and emotion and recently completed a six-year term editing Composition Studies.