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Productive Designs for Successful Failure: Constructionist Perspectives on Supporting Personally Meaningful and Culturally Empowered Learning and Teaching

Tissenbaum, M; Smith, C; Bawankule, A; Hopping, D; Holbert, N; Correa, I; Danzig, B; Zikovitz, D (October 2023, ETC Press)

In education, we cherish success and fear failure. But not every learning experience is a success right away, in fact failing and making mistakes and then learning from them is the norm rather than the exception. In this symposium, we present different perspectives on how failure can contribute to constructionist learning and teaching, examining how learners identify and address failures in their designs and how distinct approaches to failure can support learners in collaboratively creating personally meaningful projects. Taking a holistic approach to failure—that incorporates cognitive, social, and affective factors—we argue that failure should play a key role in constructionism and present different perspectives for finding a more productive stance that turns failures into rich opportunities for constructionist learning and teaching.

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