Educators increasingly extol failure as a necessary component of learning and growth. However, students frequently experience failure as a source of fear and anxiety that impedes risk-taking and experimentation. This essay examines the dissonance between these generative and stigmatized paradigms of failure, and it offers ideas for better negotiating this dissonance. After conceptualizing the two paradigms, I examine various factors that reinforce failure’s stigmatization. I emphasize precarious meritocracy, a neoliberal ethos driven by hypercompetitive individualism that makes success a zero-sum game, and that causes especially significant harms on students who are already socially stigmatized. Efforts to ameliorate paradigm dissonance tend to focus on changing student dispositions or lowering the stakes of failure. I instead propose wise interventions that include analyzing the systemic roots of stigmatized failure and making failure a more communal experience. I then briefly address the systemic transformations necessary to cultivate generative failure more broadly.
Motivation is a key factor for enhancing psychological engagement among underserved youth. However, the abundance of motivational constructs complicates the translation of theory into practice by community-based youth development programs. This paper simplifies the translation process, presenting an actionable motivation model derived from Ryan and Deci’s (2000) self-determination theory (SDT) and its sub-construct, organismic integration theory (OIT). This model was developed by Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit that cultivates long-term relationships, academic and professional success, and community engagement among low-income, adolescent students of color. Although intrinsic motivation to learn is more positively associated with psychological engagement than extrinsic motivation, contemporary institutions are built around extrinsic incentives. Therefore, guided by OIT, this model cultivates the gradual internalization of motivational regulation by supporting youth’s psychological needs of relatedness, competences, and autonomy. As a practical application of self-determination theory, this model holds promise for adoption by other youth development programs.
Students are more likely to embrace failure in learning when they are intrinsically motivated, but formal education in the United States operates through extrinsic rewards that make failure something to fear and avoid. Accordingly, the author examines the lessons of “Failure Club,” a writing course he designed to challenge this basic pedagogical contradiction.
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