{"id":19289,"date":"2016-10-17T09:45:46","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T13:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/?p=19289"},"modified":"2021-08-13T10:11:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T14:11:30","slug":"making-safe-students-fail-spotlight-shawn-graham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2016\/making-safe-students-fail-spotlight-shawn-graham\/","title":{"rendered":"Making it safe for students to fail: Spotlight on Shawn Graham"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-19291\" src=\"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/wp-content\/uploads\/Shawn-Graham-headshot-240x360.jpg\" alt=\"Headshot of Shawn Graham\" width=\"240\" height=\"360\" \/>By Cassandra Hendry, TLS Staff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Often, failure is something that fills students with dread. In a university course, failing is often synonymous with negativity. But in history professor Shawn Graham\u2019s courses, failure is not only acceptable, but positive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI try to make it safe for them to fail,\u201d Graham says. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily grade how well the exercise gets done; I assess their reflections on the process. I want them to be brutally honest about what hasn\u2019t worked and why, and what has worked and why.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Graham is one of Carleton\u2019s 2016 Provost\u2019s Fellowship in Teaching Award winners, and it\u2019s not difficult to see why. As a professor teaching digital history, his courses and pedagogy are innovative in their approach to failure and exploring the digital world.<\/p>\n<p>In one of Graham\u2019s courses, students are given their own domain and web space to \u201cexplore the tools of digital history out in the wild.\u201d He hopes that through this hands-on approach, students will be able to use the same materials scholars are using and make contributions to larger conversations.<\/p>\n<p>The projects Graham\u2019s students have produced are impressive: one built a web map detailing Canada\u2019s atomic history, while another mapped the progression of events in a single day in St. John\u2019s based on a daily newspaper.<\/p>\n<p>One of the more humorous projects Graham has seen was a student who data-mined all of the edits being made to Wikipedia pages from Government of Canada IP addresses. While the student\u2019s hypothesis of, say, the Department of National Defence making edits to military history articles didn\u2019t pan out, they did find one dedicated public servant who enjoyed editing Hanna-Barbera cartoon pages.<\/p>\n<p>Where failure comes in is in Graham\u2019s online course, where exercises are pitched to different levels of ability. Students progress through increasingly difficult exercises until they get to their \u201cfail point.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI removed the anxiety of failing by making that the entire point,\u201d Graham says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019ve had students whose final projects have completely and utterly fallen to pieces, but they\u2019ve still done very well in the course because they were able to say why this happened and what the critical issue was.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By allowing students the room to fail productively and learn from their experiences through written reflections, Graham helps his students to prepare for the world outside Carleton\u2019s walls and to think like scholars.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOnce they trust that this is what I want from them, you find really penetrating stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Cassandra Hendry, TLS Staff Writer Often, failure is something that fills students with dread. In a university course, failing is often synonymous with negativity. But in history professor Shawn Graham\u2019s courses, failure is not only acceptable, but positive. \u201cI try to make it safe for them to fail,\u201d Graham says. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily grade [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Making it safe for students to fail: Spotlight on Shawn Graham - Teaching and Learning Services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"By Cassandra Hendry, TLS Staff Writer Often, failure is something that fills students with dread. 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