From wounds to wisdom and the power of reframing

This month’s short issue will focus on things not going as expected in our learning and teaching environments and how we might turn these experiences into opportunities. There is a lot of pressure in academia to get things right first time, to excel, to demonstrate how much we know, to communicate to others what we can do, and to maintain the sense of the University as a site of higher learning. Yet, the process of learning involves failure. What does it feel like to experience and to learn from failure in teaching? Acknowledging that we are flawed as teachers, that we don’t know everything, and that things don’t always go to plan, is a powerful message to share with students. It makes us more human to our students, it also allows us to provide a safer environment in which students can fail – and learn important lessons from those failures to enable deeper understandings.

In this first post, Glen Cousquer, Lecturer and Coordinator of the MSc and MVetSci programmes in One Health and Conservation Medicine, reflects on the transformative power of “reframing” difficult situations…