Postmortem of a Civic Engagement Trainwreck: Productive Failure and Experiential Learning

What happens when civic engagement partnerships fail? What do students learn when the outcomes and desired partnership never come to fruition? This paper explores the failures experienced by students in a 2023 Civic Engaged Learning (CEL) course that collaborated with the local Board of Elections (BOE). Despite designing the course with the best practices of CEL pedagogy, the collaboration was fraught at every point. A year after the course, I interviewed students, and through these conversations, a picture of productive failure emerged: while there were pedagogical consequences to the failures in design and collaboration, the students reflected that these conditions, in some cases, enhanced their learning, while for others the failed experiment merely confirmed their views that the 2020 election was stolen. This analysis suggests CEL course design should incorporate risk and failure when engaging with community partners in civic work and include risk and failure when evaluating student learning.