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A Story of Failure
A Story of Failure
Welcome to our first of the failure stories this season. We're offering the chance to faculty and staff to tell their experiences with failure in higher education to make visible the experience and after-effects of failure. We hope that these stories resist the tradition of secrecy that our profession has built. When students hear stories about those who are successful and understand that success is far more complex than it appears, they have the chance to gain perspective when they face failure.
Our first story is told by Public Speaking professor Elena Martinez-Vidal. She tells the story of a presentation she gave that fell far, far short of her own expectations of herself. And it was witnessed not only by the general attendance of the conference but by her advisor...and his PhD advisor.
In this story, we'll do some thinking about the experience of failure in the moment and what it means to have failure witnessed by significant teachers in one's life. We'll also push forward and see what Elena made of this experience and how she thinks of it now, decades later.
We also begin to appreciate the ethical ramifications of failure storytelling in our community.
Listen to Episode 3
Listen to Episode 3
Stream from this page or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Our Guides: Elie Wiesel and the Ethics of Witnessing Suffering
Our Guides: Elie Wiesel and the Ethics of Witnessing Suffering
For Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who later earned his living by teaching and writing, for which he won a Nobel Prize among many other honors, education is essential to creating an ethical world. He would tell his students, “Whatever you learn, remember: the learning must make you more, not less, human.”
By telling her story on this podcast, Elena has offered her trust in us, her community. Wiesel believed and often said that when we listen to a story of witness, we ourselves become witnesses to their experience. In other words, when someone trusts us with their story, their story becomes part of our story. We validate it. It lives in us. And, we support the life that comes after the event. So as we tell each other our stories of failure, we are creating deeper webs of connection in our community.
Our shared work is education. We try our best to do it well. We work very, very hard at it. I think Wiesel the teacher would understand when I turn his statement around for those of us in our instructional ecosystem and say it this way: “Whatever you teach, remember: the teaching must make you more, not less, human.”
To tell a story of failure is to make yourself and your teaching more human. Our storytellers are offering you, our learning community, a way to make your teaching more human. To tell stories and create classroom learning and to uphold policies that are all designed to humanize the work and to allow our students to be human: that’s where we begin our stories of failure this season.
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