SEFI@work: Making Learning from Failure Accessible to All Students: Considerations for Power, Privilege, and Inequity

SEFI@work: Making Learning from Failure Accessible to All Students: Considerations for Power, Privilege, and Inequity

15 April 2025, 15:30-16:30 (CET)

This webinar will explore the impact that power, and privilege, and inequity play in one’s ability to embrace and learn from failure in the context of higher education.
Learning from failure is a core component of education and skills training; however, it is not often deliberately taught in the higher education context. In addition, while the rhetoric around taking risks, embracing failure, and bouncing back is pervasive, the corresponding structural supports are lacking. To help our students embrace and learn from failure, we need to consider the societal and structural contexts in which we are teaching and learning – otherwise it can lead to the (re)creation of inequitable learning environments and experiences. For example, how our students learn and recover from failure is informed by systemic barriers, power, privilege, and inequity. In this webinar, we’ll explore a framework for identifying questions that are relevant to understanding the complexities of failure in different contexts. We’ll explore ways to make visible the systems of inequity that shape student experiences and outcomes with pedagogical approaches to failure. Participants will also gain access to open educational resources and tools that they can use both within and beyond the classroom.

This workshop is for you if:

• You want to explore how the societal context and different axes of privilege impact experiences of failure
• You want to explore how the stigma of failure is inequitably distributed resulting in tangible consequences for learners
• You want to explore structural supports that are needed to support all students in learning through failure
• You want to have tangible tools you can use both within and outside the classroom to support students in learning through failure.

Speaker: Fiona Rawle, Professor, Dept of Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga and Co-Chair, Toronto Initiative for Diversity & Excellence.

Target Audience: Educators, Education PhD Students, Early-career researchers, senior administrators.

The (un)certainty (dis)comfort workshop series is a SEFI SIG Ethics project organised by Siara Isaac (EPFL).