I have taught philosophy in all types of schools, from community colleges to nationally- ranked research universities. I’ve also coached youth cycling (albeit briefly) at T-Town, one of the premier cycling centers in the United States. In both academics and sports, most people are average—somewhere within one standard deviation of the mean of a bell curve. This means they will usually fall short of the top performers on the upper tail. However that manifests, it is often experienced as a failure and, further, as something to be avoided or shameful.
It’s hard not to notice that athletes are more accepting of failure (i.e., falling short) than typical university students. While students in my courses were often terrified of making any sort of mistake (something I suppose they think “good” students don’t do), my athletes approached races and drills with the understanding that they probably weren’t going to be the best. Still, they threw themselves into it, accepting the messy process of trying, failing, receiving feedback, and trying again.
Why do youth and young adults fear failure so strongly in the academic context, but not the athletic context? Two points merit special attention. The first is that performance is manifest in sport. In the midst of a bike race or basketball game, the athlete knows exactly how they’re performing. If they are falling off the lead pack or down by double digits, they don’t have to wonder. The second point is that, in these contexts, the failures aren’t just manifest to the athlete. They are public. In fact, the entire performance distribution is public. It’s clear and immediate to everyone where each athlete falls. There is no hiding mediocrity.
The academic side is different. A student writing a term paper or answering test questions won’t know their performance until given a grade. Further, the situation is unclear enough that the student can dispute the grade. Many students complain that their grades aren’t “fair” or don’t reflect their actual abilities or performance. Finally, all of this is private. Students’ grades are visible only to them and the professor. Work is rarely shared, so the student lacks any concrete or direct sense of how their work compares to the work of their fellow students.
So, failure in sports is manifest and public, while failure in academics is obscure and private. The manifest and public nature of sports failure is also intimately entwined with another of its aspects: camaraderie. In sports, due to their public and manifest nature, failures are shared, either among teammates or (in individual sports) among fellow competitors. In such a brutal and harsh environment, bonds naturally form between athletes, bonds which support them through the failures.
Is there camaraderie in academics? I think there are some clear cases. In the United States, first- and second-year PhD students in philosophy and mathematics (the two subjects with which I’m familiar) usually take intense coursework. Often assignments are so difficult that even the most talented students struggle to complete them alone, and so (inevitably) study groups form. I remember late nights with my fellow students, trying to work out the details of a math proof or reconstruct a subtle argument in a philosophical text. These experiences certainly involved a high degree of camaraderie. It’s also likely not a coincidence that, unlike in many academic contexts, these situations involved (like sports) manifest and public failure. My, and my peers’, inability to come up with proof or reconstruct an argument was clear to us all. We were standing by a blank blackboard, or sitting around a blank notebook, none of us able to put down anything.
However, this example doesn’t translate well into the typical undergraduate context, especially in philosophy and even more so in low-level introductory courses. In these cases, ratcheting up the difficulty so much that students cannot possibly complete the work on their own is just as likely (or even more likely) to lead to cheating, drops, vocal complaints, and abysmal teaching evaluations than it is to lead to organic teamwork and camaraderie. Instead, I think a better starting point is to think about class presentations. Like sporting performances, class presentations are certainly public. Although not quite as manifest as in sports, students also have at least some sense of how these performances go, e.g., whether the presenter is well-spoken, clear, and interesting.
I found two things that maximize the benefits to the public and manifest the nature of class presentations. First, it’s better to spread them out so that one or two students present every class instead of cramming all presentations into one or two class sessions. If students all prepare and present simultaneously, insights gained from watching others can’t be incorporated into their own work. By spreading presentations out, students can learn from what they see and the whole affair of someone sharing a presentation becomes a communal ritual. Second, the academic stakes need to be low so that the consequences of failure are low. For example, in my Intro to Cognitive Science class, I had students present and break down a recent psychology or neuroscience study. I gave them a clear rubric for how I wanted them to break down the study, but I graded very loosely (mostly awarding full points for checking boxes) and gave them wide latitude in selecting whatever they found interesting. This turned the presentations into more of a time of “show and tell” with the class, while also over the semester allowing me to kindly point out areas of improvement.
Aside from the obvious, there’s another feature of class presentations with important connections to their manifestness and publicity. Like sports, presentations are embodied performances. Presentations can fail or succeed along dimensions besides their intellectual content. The vocal delivery, timing, hand gestures, posture, pacing, gaze direction, eye contact, and shared attention all figure as constitutive parts of the communicative act of presenting. This embodied character brings a certain kind of felt presence to the classroom. In this case, success and failure are not purely “mental” or “in the head,” able to be hidden from one’s peers and out of public space.
I’ve seen more interesting examples of embodied learning as well. A colleague of mine in performing arts with a movement science background, Elinor Harrison, teaches a very popular course here at Washington University in St. Louis on the neuroscience of dance. In the course, the students not only do the usual book learning, but engage in related physical practices like dancing, balancing, or playing catch. Harrison has found that these low-stakes exercises help to build camaraderie. I’ve done something similar in my own courses to bring content to life, e.g., leading students on introspective exercises to teach them about phenomenal consciousness. My favorite is to have students sharpen old-style wood-barrel pencils with a heavy metal pencil sharpener while describing what it’s like.
As to concrete results I’ve observed from this “shared embodied learning,” those are harder to pin down—I have no controlled trials. Anecdotally, the most obvious thing I’ve noticed is a change in classroom energy. Students open up. They talk more, which is (of course) inherently risky, as they may say something wrong. There is, perhaps, also a real sense of camaraderie, less a feel of individuals showing up and operating independently in the room and more a feel of a social experience.
Where does this lead us? Failure is just part of the game, a necessity for growth and learning, and something to be overcome with the support of friends. When failure is obscure and private, it feels shameful, it’s to be feared and suffered alone. When failure is manifest and public, it can be embraced as a challenge and birth camaraderie. One safe way to make failure manifest and public in academic spaces is to use embodied learning experiences, which are by their nature both manifest and public.
This post is based on one originally published on Michael Barkasi’s website on October 29, 2020. Some parts of the original are reproduced verbatim.
