Reimagining Failure: Lessons from the WOW Retreat
On Friday, February 21st, a group of women students gather in the Carriage House lounge around a panel of some of Chatham’s most-senior female leaders. There is an air of easily misidentified adrenaline—it’s Friday, Spring break is on the horizon. At one point a male student wanders in and asks, “What is going on?” It’s the beginning of the 12th annual Women of the World Retreat, the Office of Student Engagement’s three-day leadership retreat for female-identifying students.
This year is centered on teaching students how to navigate the other “F” word: failure. To kick it off, vice presidents and deans are offering up some of their more stinging failures for discussion. Vice President of Enrollment, Amy Becher, received an illustrious Director of Admission position at the University of Michigan and hated it. Dean of the School of Arts, Science, and Business, Dr. Darlene Motley, tried to emulate her older sister’s outgoing personality and found it exhausting. Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Jenna Templeton, lost a potential position because she disagreed with her interviewer. After each panelist has presented their own “F” word moment, the question is raised, ‘What does it really mean to fail?’
Retreat participants gather in front of EHC’s beloved plant wall
This sentiment recurs throughout the weekend, as ‘failures’ often precede breakthroughs, transformations, successes, and new dreams. Assistant Vice President for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Dr. Randi Congleton, offers up one philosophy, “Is it a failure or an opportunity to craft the story of your life?” Dr. Templeton calls on a quote from her calendar that morning, “Failure is part of life, getting back up is living.” Assistant Vice President of Finance & Administration, Jen Hoerster, has an acronym: “FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning.”
“You have got to find your voice and sometimes you're going to find IT through failure. that's okay. the key is tO fail fast, be resilient, and pick yourself up. Find the positive in it and keep going.” —AMY BECHER
Following the panel, students head to Eden Hall for the weekend where they embark on a series of workshops, discussions, group activities, and more. Friday night, they’re doing an improv workshop with the Arcade Comedy Theatre; Saturday afternoon, they’re exercising with alumna, Marylloyd Claytor, MLA ’00. Each guest speaker—many of whom are alumnae—approaches her session differently, sometimes engaging students in a guided activity, sometimes reflecting on the more personal failures of her life.
Kipp Dawson ‘94, whose resume includes such feats as coal-mining and middle school-teaching, asks students to reflect on failure as a label that disenfranchised groups are disproportionately burdened with. In 1979, she got a job as a coal miner and found herself in the mines with other so-called failures: “We realized if we looked at each other as people whose lives were in each other's hands—we saved each other all the time in the mines—that we were the opposite of failures.” She calls on students to ‘tell stories’ and they confide their own personal experiences of failure, as well as the ways they feel they’ve had to shoulder the societal label of failure. She listens, nods, and validates, meeting them with a calm but powerful compassion.
“Pick a letter that stands for a word that society has branded you. Cut it out, decorate it, make it nice and pretty, and put it in your room. Remind yourself to own it.” —student participant
Guest speaker, alumna, and Assistant Professor of English, Dr. Allie Reznik ‘11, attended the first ever WOW Retreat before Eden Hall Campus was much more than a community garden. It’s where she met her wife, Jenn Van Dam ‘12. Dr. Reznik calls on Jenn’s understanding of failure: “My wife works in the tech-entrepreneurial system where you fail fast and move on, it's not personal. In many fields, failing equals data.” Reznik asks students to analyze their failures using the tool of identity-centered personal narrative, modeled after Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade: “In telling your narrative, you find community. You find that there are a lot of people that are experiencing the same thing. What is the failure actually signifying? That's taking control of the narrative,” she tells the room.
Ashleigh Deemer ’05, Deputy Director of PennEnvironment and co-founder of Women for the Future, shares the story of a very public and painful experience: losing a 2017 grassroots campaign for city council. In the aftermath, she and other women politicians founded Women for the Future, a political action committee that helps fundraise for women running for office. Her take on failure?
“In the short term, it feels easy to call something a failure: you have a goal, you set out to achieve it, it doesn't work out. In a long-term sense, nothing has to be a failure. If you go back and analyze what happened, you can take away something useful or help fix whatever system failed you.” —ashleigh deemer ‘05
At the close of the weekend, students are each handed their own personal “Certificate of Failure” which authorizes them to go forth and, “Screw up, bomb, or fail at one or more relationships, friendships, text messages, exams, extracurriculars, attempts at something new, or any other choices, efforts, or activities, and still be totally worthy, utterly excellent human beings.”
Interested in learning more about the Office of Student Engagement and the leadership workshops and civic engagement opportunities they offer? Check out our website.
