Failing in studies and in an academic career isn’t necessarily bad. PhD researchers and academics underestimate the benefits of failure not only for students but also for themselves. The failure, however, is unavoidable, given the fact that academic environments create conditions to fail in many instances.
I often find myself in a situation when I am required to explain the meaning of the word that I use in my writing, as some of my favourite terms are value-laden. During a discussion on my thesis paper with a language consultant, we stopped at the point of education being essential for developing students’ virtues. To support my case, I referred to the movie “The Dead Poets Society” and we spent a little while discussing this masterpiece which we both liked. This brilliant movie, alongside other ideas, carries the message that failure is an integral part of learning.
To understand my point, let’s consider assessments mechanisms in measuring learning progress. Most empirical research on success focuses on such measures of progress as grade point average or exam results (Rotar, 2023). Academic stress, associated with these forms of formal assessment, referred to in the literature as academic performance anxiety or evaluation anxiety, represents a crucial psychosocial challenge for students (Hjeltnes, Binder, Moltu, & Dundas, 2015). This is a real barrier to overall learning, potentially limiting all kinds of the learning experience. To overcome this barrier, it is essential to acknowledge that the meaning of success is not as narrow as is commonly perceived. For instance, subjective success refers to individuals’ feelings about their accomplishments. Coming back to the “The Dead Poets Society” movie to support this point, both the master and his students dared to go against the system and, arguably, failed. Yet, they all gained something significantly more important.
Now, let’s discuss the teaching and research results-based frameworks. A brief look at the evaluation criteria for the teaching excellence framework (TEF), implemented by UK universities, shows that it does not measure actual teaching and it’s not clear how it can identify good teaching (listen to our podcast with Adam Matthews, where we discuss the limitations of TEF and read the opinion of Professor Paul Ashiwn, Educational Research Department, Lancaster University). Incentive contracts and the Research Excellence framework encourage further competitiveness within academia, where academics need to continuously legitimise themselves as good and successful. Additionally, there is increasing pressure on academics to obtain funding, as well as an increasingly diverse students. Furthermore, low acceptance rates in credible academic journals mean that excellent work will be published, whereas good papers are likely to be rejected. In other words, academia is “anchored to a system of failure” (Turner, 2020, p. 1) and the failing process is ingrained into the evaluation mechanisms for both students and academics.
But does the word failure have only a negative connotation? We forget that failing is part of learning, teaching and life in general. In the same way as university experience cannot be measured only by grades and exam results, failure cannot be considered from its negative side only. Learning to fail is almost as important as learning in order not to fail. Let’s consider two examples. For the first-in-family university student, simply entering a university is already an event that will greatly change one’s life trajectory, regardless of results and whether the student passes the exams and graduates (O’Shea et al., 2018). For an international student, successful university experience will be also associated with cultural adjustment and adaptation, with many failures to immediately fit in and negotiations of personal struggles in “crafting a new life” (Benton, 2015, p.186).
The idea of negotiating failure is vital here. Being a part of the academic community inevitably means encountering failing mechanisms and failures. This experience is rewarding for growing as a person and developing individual virtues. As Turner (2020) say, we all need to learn how to negotiate our lives around and adjust to “the infrastructure of failure in order to succeed” ( p. 1).