Celebrating Failure and Other Countercultural Ideas
December 4, 2025
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development
I recently attended an education conference which had some countercultural sessions that I thought might be intriguing to our faculty. The conference was run by the Professional & Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD). If you would like to see any of these ideas implemented at Valpo, please contact CITAL.
A Celebration of Risk-Taking
The teaching center at Seattle University sponsors an annual “Celebration of Risk-Taking.” At this event, they honor the faculty who in the past year have had a rejected grant proposal, book chapter, article, or curriculum idea. This event reframes failure and rejection as effort and innovation. The idea for this celebration came from an article in the The Atlantic called The Fine Art of Failure.
Before the event, they collect all of the rejected ideas into one large spreadsheet. Then they categorize them and create a PowerPoint slide show. For each category, they actually make a toast, providing faculty attendees with shot glasses so that they can toast with their beverage of choice.
When they first issued the invitation for this event, they found that even faculty who could not attend still wanted to see their rejected ideas listed. It turns out that in sharing their failures, faculty felt less alone and vulnerable, and were more inclined to view rejection as merely part of the process toward ultimate success. The faculty loved this event and asked for it to be repeated every year.
Candid Conversations
Seattle University has also created space for faculty to have candid conversations about some of the controversial topics facing us, both at the national and international level. Recent topics have included:
- Teaching During the Elections
- Left to our own Devices
- What do we Mean by Rigor?
- Are we Infantalizing our Students?
The presenters demonstrated how they foster cordial disagreement around these topics. They began by having us take a position on the following proposition: “Colleges must teach our students to use AI, despite varying levels of comfort, access, and ethical considerations.” At each table there was a large double-arrowed-line with “strongly agree” on one end and “strongly disagree” on the other. Each person at our table placed a sticky note on the part of the line that represented our own view. Then we went around the table and everyone spoke about why they held the position they did. As you might expect, there was a wide range of views on this topic and hearing everyone out was very important. It felt good to openly discuss our disparate views rather than avoiding a controversial issue.
Compassionate Pedagogy
As we all know, every year more and more of our students are dealing with depression and anxiety. That is why I attended a presentation given by Vicki Pitstick, from Ohio State University on compassionate pedagogy. She defines this kind of teaching as prioritizing students’ emotional well being and responding to their needs with empathy and care. Vicki argued that there are a number of things that faculty can do to help address those issues. Faculty on her campus created a Community of Practice on Compassionate Pedagogy that came up with some recommendations:
- Consider starting each class by thanking and honoring students for being there and acknowledging all the issues they might be dealing with.
- Whenever you have students do a group activity, have them introduce themselves.
- In group activities, ask the ones who speak easily to try not speaking first, but rather to ask what others are thinking.
- Trigger versus Glimmer: purposely use encouraging words, words that uplift students.
- Meet students where they are.
- Institute practices that help students make friends in your class: consider making that a course objective.
- If your class is too large to get personal, then provide resources, but also tell them how to use those resources, giving examples of how you or your students have done so.
- Approach all interactions with kindness and respect.
For further reading Vicki cited two books on this topic:
- Lisa Nunn, College Belonging
- What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching
If any of these ideas appeal to you, please click here to contact CITAL.