Workshop
Tuesday, September 24th from 11:00am to 3:00pm
UPDATE: Unfortunately, we made the decision to cancel this event due to low registration. However, we hope to reschedule the workshop in 2025, so please stay tuned!
A Beginner's Guide to Failure is a half-day cohort experience that teaches library workers how to celebrate failure–really! Instead of viewing failure as evidence of something lacking, this short course endeavors to help individuals better integrate failure as part of being fully human, taking creative risks, and growing critical skills and mindsets for learning organizations. In other words, despite the common misconception, failure is the rule, not the exception, and more failure actually leads to better ideas, creative solutions, and more productive workplaces! This workshop draws on teachings in emotional intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and culture. Our specific goals and objectives for this workshop are to:
- Encourage critical engagement and exploration of the concept of failure in our lives, especially, but not exclusively, our work lives;
- Experiment with new ways of failing productively, including design-thinking and prototyping approaches;
- Explore stories of failure in library-settings, normalizing the experience of failure;
- Experience failure as part of a work of beauty and impermanence; and
- Help workers orient themselves and develop unique connections to fellow workers in a shared spirit of celebrating failure.
Lunch will be served.
About the Instructor: A.M. Alpin is a creative librarian and educator who teaches creative workshops at NYU, the Made in NY Media Lab, and other institutions. In addition to producing countless failures, she is the past recipient of the Sundance Institute's Sheila C. Johnson Creative Producing Fellowship, the American Library Association's Advocacy & Innovation in Library History Award, and the Association of College & Research Libraries' Outstanding Professional Development Award. Her creative work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, the Independent Filmmaker Project, the Austin Film Society, the Southern Humanities Media Fund, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.