'The stories we tell about failure'- Musings on why making in a science museum is a great basis to explore young people's experiences of failure

This blog post is one of two posts that adapt the presentation I gave at the Northern Bridge Summer School 2025, in Durham, into writing.

As you'll hopefully have seen somewhere on this website, I'm doing a PhD (I'm one of those insufferable PhD students who is absolutely loving it and will happily talk shop with everyone and anyone) - and my PhD is based in Life Science Centre's Making Studios.

When we sit someone down in the Making Studios, the opening line of our spiel is: "Welcome to the Making Studios: This is where you come to find problems". The philosophy of the space, based on the ideas of tinkering and the Maker Mindset, is very much failure-positive, encouraging young people and family groups to engage and work through tricky problems, and hopefully offering an opportunity to learn some problem-solving skills in the process.

There are two key reasons why I think researching reactions & responses to failure in science museums are really interesting. The first: traditional education encourages a fear of failure.

I think this is a pretty common-sense thing, but in the interviews I was doing for the first phase of my PhD with visitors, children discussed how the pressure of needing to pass tests and get things right made failure a scary prospect in school. From there, it's reasonably easy to see how students who have a fear of failure would be led to disengage from education - we can think of these students splitting down two paths: either they become overachievers who put massive pressure on themselves because they can't face getting anything wrong (I absolutely have no idea what that feels like, what a crazy thing...) or they avoid the prospect of failure by not even trying, and therefore disengage from education (Caraway et al. (2003) and De Castella et al. (2013) both explore this idea, so see them for more details).

So reason one why museum makerspaces are a great place to study responses to failure is because they're informal education, so in theory the same pressure on passing or failing isn't present. The second idea is the one I think is even more intriguing: the typical visitor group we get in the museum is families - whether that's nuclear families, grandparents & grandchildren, family friends or a huge variety of other groupings - of people with strong pre-existing relationships.

In my thesis title, the 'intergenerational' focus is representative of these family groups. Fear of failure in a family context is very interesting. Psychologists Andrew Elliot and Todd Thrash (2003) found that fear of failure could be passed down between generations - they were looking at whether parents' scores on a fear of failure test would correlate with the children's scores, and found they fit well. That means that our own perception of failure can impact other people's in our family, especially if they look up to us.

I think that's particularly interesting when we look at the kinds of behaviours that young people with a fear of failure demonstrate - yes, they disengage from traditional education, but in another research article, Andrew Elliot and Holly McGregor (2005) suggest that people who have a high fear of failure tend to avoid sharing their failures with their family. If we know parents can influence how their children view failure, and that when children become fearful of failure they stop sharing their experiences of failure with their parents, then we can see how this could become a cycle of continuing fear.

That is why I think looking at how family groups respond to failures that they experience together, and where they need to work together to solve the problems, is particularly interesting. I'm also going to be looking at what kinds of resources we could create to help adults support the young people they're with to become less fearful of failure, and develop their problem solving skills.

Lofty goals I know - now I just need to work out how to do that! But my next step is working out what language I'm going to use. In this post, I've used the word failure 22 times - but according to my interviews, visitors don't think that's the right word to use. Me next post will be some more musings on why that is, and what language we could use instead. Stay tuned!