Video by the Dreamspace Story Lab team
Today is day 2 of the adults class. Yesterday, I had my students go around their study area outside of Dreamspace, look at tracks and sign, and make a guess for where they thought an animal might visit in the night. They put up cameras looking at the site to check their guesses.
Most of them will come in today and find nothing on their cameras. It’s not their fault — they could have done everything right — they could have found the exact spot where an animal passed through the night before, but because of the weird new camera on its trail or the human scent lying around, the animal pass nearby, think that something is off about this run and choose another path. Or maybe it was just hanging out somewhere else entirely last night. We only had one night’s opportunity to get things right, and odds are that it won’t work out for many of the students.
I’m curious how that not-working-out is going to affect them. Failures happen for sure when you’re trying to predict wild animal behavior, but there’s nothing like an early success when you’re trying something new and hard. I’m very curious to see how the students respond to failure today, and how to they’ll get past the initial frustration. Adults and children also handle failure in different ways — no matter how you slice it, failure is a constant partner to learning. Failure hits some learners harder than others, particularly people who feel competitive or like they must always get the right answer. Both adults and kids have those tendencies, but kids generally have a built-in tolerance of failure, which helps them learn despite inconsistent instruction, difficult learning environments, and just regular old difficult material. I’m curious how each class will get past their initial failures.
There are some ways I can mitigate failures in the way I set up the class, which I should probably formalize as I start trying out more failure-prone variants of the class like the accelerated, 6-day version. Off the top of my head, the best thing I can probably do is to frame the class as a collaborative activity rather than a competitive one, where any group’s videos are fair game for the whole class to work with, rather than requiring that each group find their own story. That way, a success in anyone’s group is a success for the whole class, and helps cushion out any one group’s bad luck.
Another fascinating day in the classroom!