Failure. Failure’s been on all of our minds a lot in the past few years, whether it’s failing to meet a deadline, feeling like a failure, students failing classes, the failure of the US justice system, or the systemic failure of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In my podcast episode of the ABCs of Academe, I speak with teacher educator and social justice advocate Naitnaphit Limlamai about what it means to fail. Aptly titled “Teaching Failure,” the two of us discuss failure. Failure is slippery. At once it is both personal and attached to bodies, especially in schooling settings. But second, it is nebulous, located in the relationship between ideological and institutional ideas of “success” and how they are enacted by individual people. These ideas of success and failure are not neutral, and neither are the evaluations of people. Naitnaphit and I think through the thorny opportunities of recognizing our aims as educators as potentially being different from the educational institutions we serve and how those differences may impact preservice and inservice teachers. How do we help them to disentangle what it means to be a “good” teacher, especially when they and their students are under constant surveillance? The podcast acts as a model of open and vulnerable communication about the struggles of teaching, connecting these struggles to the lay and research-based theories of failure that we develop in school and throughout our lives. Through talking about failure and telling stories about failures, we can start the work of unpacking, for us and for our students, how to be more equitable and just as educators.

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