Failure can be a scary prospect in any field, but it’s sometimes a necessary one to grow and improve.  IU School of Education professor Rob Kunzman will delve into navigating failure in a talk this month - and learning to manage the worries around it.

Kunzman first started to think about failure in the context of teacher preparation, especially when it came to the pressure that School of Education teacher candidates might feel stepping into the P-12 classroom amidst incredible complexity and challenges. Kunzman wondered if the students were given enough “permission to fail” as they learned their craft, and if they were helped learn how to analyze their inevitable failures in ways that would help them grow and improve.

After teaching in Hutton Honors College for the past seven years and working with students from across campus and a wide array of academic majors, Kunzman started to examine how different disciplines viewed and understood failure in their own fields, and whether exploring those similarities and differences might provide some valuable insights.

Now through a course he’ll be teaching again this spring and a talk October 15, Kunzman will survey and describe how some different fields, including science, engineering and design, business and entrepreneurship, athletics, education and medicine, understand, analyze and learn from failure - and what some of the common threads might have to teach all of us about navigating failure in our own lives, professionally and personally. The talk and course fit in with IU’s Themester focus for the year, “Resilience.”

“I’m not sure we can really develop resilience apart from failure—it’s learning how to respond to the inevitable setbacks, challenges and disappointments of life that cultivates resilience. IU’s selection of ‘resilience’ for Themester is a great one, and we have plenty of company. If you Google ‘resilience project,’ you’ll see its presence around the world, including many colleges and universities. Often it includes opportunities for students, faculty and staff to share their own experiences of failure, both as a catharsis and to let us know we’re not alone.”

“As I will explain in my talk, resilience in the face of failure is not a fixed or innate quality, but a fluctuating capacity. It’s not simply about ‘bouncing back’ from failure, but learning to manage the ongoing tension that exists as we navigate the distance between what we desire in our lives and what we actually experience,” he added.

When approaching the idea of failure, Kunzman recognizes it’s different depending on each job.

“Athletes and teachers experience failure regularly in their work, but an engineer who builds bridges can’t afford a single failure,” Kunzman explained. “So their relationships to failure, how they understand and navigate it, have to be different.  Many fields (medicine, for example) have to figure out how to define and interpret failure (e.g., not making a patient better) in ways that allow them to continue their work amidst its regular presence.”