15 Sep 2024

This visual blog was written by Technician Demonstrator in Photography, Libby Billings, a PgCert student from the 2023/2024 cohort, as part of the Higher Education in Practice: Personal reflections on your discipline and the wider context of higher education submission.

Libby Billings

The national institute for Health and Care excellence states that “students who are focused on the possibility of failure, experience imposter syndrome, perfectionism, or low academic self-efficacy are also more likely to develop mental health problems including anxiety”. (NICE, 2020) 

As a Technician Demonstrator in Photography, this rings very true for many students that I support, particularly first year students who may be experiencing other new stressors in their lives (being away from home, new financial pressures). Some students are so afraid of failure, that they completely avoid using specific equipment and technologies available to them in the department and feel stuck when trying to make their project work. Eckstein notes that as a result of HE rewarding competition, correct answers and achievement, students see failure as shameful, and consequently “when students see failure as a reflection of their self-worth, they avoid it as much as possible (Covington 1984).” (Eckstein, p. 3, 2023) 

Eckstein (p. 2, 2023) suggests there may be a ‘disconnect between the messages that students hear from faculty about failure and the messages sent by the way many assignments and college classrooms are set up, which often only reward students for “getting it right” the first time.” 

It is therefore important to reframe failure to students, and this is supported in pedagogical research and writings: Eckstein (p. 5, 2023) lays out her strategies for incorporating Failure Pedagogy, including sharing and destigmatising your own failures for students; introducing the concept of imposter syndrome; teaching about fixed vs growth mindset; and prioritising practice and process via low stakes assignments; Houghton and Reeves (p. 4, 2019) discuss assessment should be more focused on risk-taking, than the outcome of the risk, that the assessor should be looking for ‘metacognition’, “in other words, them to be cognizant of what they are doing – and of how they are evaluating what they are doing as they try out new things”; Dr Liz Brewster emphasises the importance of how students view failure “as a whole, not only in studying, but in life generally”, and carried out a series of workshops for students about failure: “If we had called them ‘how to be an academic success’, students wouldn’t have shown up because they didn’t feel like they could do it. Calling it ‘academic failure’ started to appeal to students who did come, and it was powerful for them to see that they weren’t alone.... having that space to be vulnerable. They all thought they would be the only one in the room. In the eyes of the institution, they weren’t failing at all. Moving away from that individual construction and knowing you’re not alone is vital.” (Advance HE, 2023); Professor Carol Dweck emphasises the power of ‘not yet’, helping learners to realise that failure is not the end point but part of the learning journey. (Dweck, 2014) 

I have created a moving image response, inspired by John Baldessari’s series ‘Wrong’. Baldessari was an artist and an educator, perhaps this series was inspired by student’s perceived failures, and maybe his rejection of the idea of failure? Whether or not that is true, his embrace of ‘wrong ness’ is inspirational. The moving image documents my interaction with ChatGPT, wherein even the machine can ‘fail’, and fail within the subject of failure itself.  

I give ChatGPT the instruction: ‘Based on this photographic work by John Baldessari, please make me more 'wrong' photographs. For example, in the work provided, the tree is directly behind the head of the subject, which would traditionally make it considered a bad photograph’. ChatGPT gives me unpredicted results, sometimes misinterprets my suggestions for improvement, or puts its own spin on my prompt.  

I felt that ChatGPT’s response, in some ways, embodied the unexpected kind of responses we might hope for from students: 

  • Embrace of Carol Dweck’s philosophy of ‘not yet’ – ChatGPT did not give up when I said I wasn’t happy with the results, even responding “I'm glad the image sparked a reaction, even if it didn't quite hit the mark as intended!” 
  • A keenness (is that too anthropomorphic?) and embrace of the task despite being faced with a fairly vague ‘prompt’ (in place of a ‘brief’ for a student.) 
  • Utilising the ‘vagueness’ of the brief to create responses which were unexpected to me, the task setter. 

In the end, I asked ChatGPT if it thought our conversation was a good metaphor, to share with students, for the benefits of ‘failure’, in that it had created images that were interesting, despite not precisely meeting what I had asked for. ChatGPT agreed that it had, citing exploration and unexpected outcomes; value in ‘mistakes’; feedback and iteration; and subjectivity in success as key lessons in a creative learning process. 

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