ABSTRACT

One way to support academics as whole people is to address the psychology of success and failure in academic work. Despite their success in securing doctorates and academic positions, academics often feel like imposters. The current neoliberal audit culture reinforces this sense by demanding more and more of them in terms of outputs that are ‘successful’ when measured and thus financialised. But the feelings of failure such an environment seems designed to elicit from them can be addressed productively. In this article, we address how academic developers can enable academics to reconceptualise their ‘failures’ as teachable moments by ‘re-storying’ them to locate the value of failure in academic work. We explore a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching seminar activity that allows participants to re-story a ‘failure’ and a symposium on failure, which elicited stories of ‘failure’ from a panel of exemplary tertiary teachers to show how open talk about it can ‘normalize’ failure as part of every academic career and a learning experience. By facilitating such talk, academic developers can enable academics to push back against the sense that academia is only about success stories, and to embrace ‘successful failure’.

摘要

支持全体学者的一种方法是解决学术工作成败的心理。尽管在确保博士学位和学术职位方面取得了成功，但学者们常常觉得自己是冒名顶替者。当前的新自由主义审计文化通过在衡量和财务化后“成功”的产出方面要求越来越多的需求来加强这种意识。但是，这种环境似乎旨在从失败中引起的失败感可以有效地解决。在本文中，我们探讨了学术开发人员如何通过“重新存储”他们以定位失败在学术工作中的价值，从而使他们能够将他们的“失败”重新概念化为可教导的时刻。我们在高等教育教学研讨会活动中探索了一份研究生证书，该证书使与会人员可以重述“失败”和关于失败的专题讨论会，这些案例从一群模范的高等教师小组中引出了“失败”的故事，以显示公开谈论它的方式可以“将失败作为每个学术职业和学习经历的一部分。通过促进这样的讨论，学术开发人员可以使学术界摆脱学术界只关注成功故事的观念，并接受“成功的失败”。