The Role of Sociocultural Interactions on Persistence Through Failure in Making Contexts

• In Event: 35.028 - Failure in the Learning Process: How Learners Experience and Overcome Obstacles Through Resources and Supports

Abstract

Grit and growth mindset have given people hope that the key to improving student academic achievement is through character development relating to youth’s abilities to persevere through failures (Duckworth et al., 2007; Dweck, 2006). Celebration of failure—defined as frustrating moments, roadblocks, and mistakes when design/build processes do not go as planned—sits at the heart of the increasingly popular Maker Movement, in which “tolerat[ing] risk and failure” can “creat[e] innovative thinkers and doers” (Dougherty, 2013, p. 9; Martin, 2015). Yet recent studies suggest that changing youth mindsets is not enough, and focusing on individual character places responsibility on students while taking attention away from educational institutions that exacerbate systemic inequalities (Li & Bates, 2017; Credé, Tynan, & Harms, 2016; Rose, 2015). For many without the privilege and resources to be able to fail and try again, risk-aversion is a better option (Eason, 2014).

Moving beyond a focus on character education and individual “decisions” to persist through failure, this study explores the detail of youth’s collaborative experiences working through challenging moments in their Making projects. Informed by sociocultural theories of learning that emphasize a focus on the interactions between people within an activity system rather than individuals in isolation (Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, del Rio, & Alvarez, 1995), the research illustrates the results of an ethnographic case study analyzing observations, videos, and interviews with different groups of high school girls working in collaborative teams—who either demonstrate persistence or not through failures—in an afterschool Making program for young women underrepresented in STEM fields. More specifically, this research explores the details of youth experiences with failure to understand why and when youth chose to persist through challenging intellectual pursuits toward offering practical suggestions for how educators and learning environments can be organized to support such learning.

Findings reflect the importance of the following toward working through failure: 1) playfulness and humor are key for supporting youth to work through challenging moments; 2) youth must feel ownership of their projects toward a desire to both own and overcome failures; 3) and youth must be working in supportive collaborations where their intellectual contributions are valued. Furthermore, this study’s approach to looking beyond individual persistence through failure emphasizes how important examinations of sociocultural contexts are to understanding how and why youth can learn through failure. As such, this work has important implications for designing positive learning environments for youth underrepresented in STEM that can support collaborative work through challenges and failures in complex projects.

Authors

• Jean J. Ryoo, University of California - Los Angeles

• Linda Kekelis, Techbridge