Coaxing success from failure through academic development

Abstract

ABSTRACT One way to support academics as whole people is to address the psychology of success and failure in academic work. Despite their success in securing doctorates and academic positions, academics often feel like imposters. The current neoliberal audit culture reinforces this sense by demanding more and more of them in terms of outputs that are ‘successful’ when measured and thus financialised. But the feelings of failure such an environment seems designed to elicit from them can be addressed productively. In this article, we address how academic developers can enable academics to reconceptualise their ‘failures’ as teachable moments by ‘re-storying’ them to locate the value of failure in academic work. We explore a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching seminar activity that allows participants to re-story a ‘failure’ and a symposium on failure, which elicited stories of ‘failure’ from a panel of exemplary tertiary teachers to show how open talk about it can ‘normalize’ failure as part of every academic career and a learning experience. By facilitating such talk, academic developers can enable academics to push back against the sense that academia is only about success stories, and to embrace ‘successful failure’.