ABSTRACT
This chapter celebrates the joy of failure. The author reflects on how her first-year composition program’s pilot of alternative grading failed to empower students and teaching assistants (TAs) as they had hoped it would. Drawing on Ross Gay’s conception of joy as an intentional practice of connection and Pema Chödrön’s conception of discomfort as “good news,” the author describes how continually tuning into the values of equity and compassion that launched her program down the road of pedagogical experimentation allowed her and her colleagues to wield joy as a compass through failure. While this story describes a particular kind of failure, readers can “fill in the blank” with any pedagogical fizzle/flop they’ve experienced and consider how joy can animate those defeats. Indeed, the author argues, a commitment to our pedagogical values as distinct from an attachment to enacting them through particular means can help educators in any context access joy by reframing failures as opportunities to clarify and affirm why we do what we do.
