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Guest post from IGI Global author Lisa Beckelhimer

Flip Failure into Success

By IGI Global on Dec 15, 2014
Guest post by: Lisa Beckelhimer, Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati

Implementation and Critical Assessment of the Flipped Classroom Experience Recently, a student researching how South Koreans view the North Korean lifestyle (he’s South Korean) struggled because he couldn’t find credible newspaper and journal articles quoting South Koreans. “They seem afraid and like they don’t want to talk to media about North Korea,” Hae Sung told me. While we were looking up some citation formats, he noticed instructions for how to cite YouTube videos, tweets, and Facebook posts. “You mean we are allowed to research social networking sites?” he asked excitedly, but also tentatively. “That’s where people talk!”

I encouraged Hae Sung not only to cite social networking sites, but also to discuss this research challenge in his project. He viewed his lack of research from media and scholarly sources as a mistake – a failure of his research skills. I viewed his discovery of visual and social networking sources as a learning experience – which makes me question: Do we allow students to make mistakes? Do we expect students’ research process to be messy and a bit chaotic? If we don’t, we should.

Granted, we don’t want to encourage all students researching all topics to abandon traditional source material in favor of tweets. But my point is that we should be willing to transform what students see as failures into triumphs – to flip mistakes into successes.

Scholars writing about research as a process of inquiry agree that making mistakes is a crucial part of the learning process. P.M. Hendry, in the article “Narrative as inquiry” for The Journal of Educational Research, claims that “wandering, and perhaps getting lost, is key to the ongoing process of inquiry.”

Instead of encouraging students to look for the sources they think the teacher wants to see, why not encourage students to research their topics through a series of questions like this: What is my purpose in researching this topic? What do I already know and what do I need to learn? Where should I start? Am I looking for a particularly type of source or should I research with an open mind? What will happen if I fail to find the source I’m looking for?

In my chapter on using technology to help students conduct research through visual steps in the upcoming book Implementation and Critical Assessment of the Flipped Classroom Experience, edited by Dr. Abigail Scheg, I discuss a specific strategy for flipping instruction that capitalizes on revealing students’ successes and their failures. Several positive results emerge from allowing students the freedom to make mistakes. Students feel empowered over the research process because they’re not pressured to find the “right” answer in a source. They also learn that most processes in life are messy and filled with failures along with successes. Most importantly, students learn that it’s fine to experiment and encounter challenges, and that true scholars learn and make discoveries through a series of failed attempts.


Flip Failure into Success Lisa Beckelhimer is an Associate Professor of English Composition at the University of Cincinnati. Professor Beckelhimer’s scholarly interests include technology and writing, distance learning curricula, historical and political rhetoric, visual rhetoric, and the rhetoric of sports. In addition to publishing, she has presented on these topics at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).


Sources:

Hendry, P.M. (2010). Narrative as inquiry. The Journal of Educational Research, 103, 72-80.

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