Building Community Through Error: Learning (Together) from What Went Wrong

In community-engaged work with K–12 schools, mistakes are not the exception; they are part of the terrain. Yet, within the current neoliberal climate of higher education, failure is often framed as something to “fail forward” from, smoothing over complexity in the name of productivity. Our workshop, Building Community Through Error: Where We Messed Up Working with K–12 Schools, began as a deliberate rejection of that logic. Instead of asking how to fix or optimize community partnerships, we asked a more human question: What happens when we stay with our mistakes long enough to learn from them?

My current and former DU colleagues Drs. Calley Marotta (University Writing Program) and Sarah Hart Micke (Texas State University) presented with me at the 2025 Conference on Community Writing at Wayne State University this fall. Together, we drew on our experiences working with K–12 schools to surface the tensions, constraints, and missteps that often remain invisible in public- and institutional-facing accounts of community-engagement.

The presentation centered on three community-engaged projects involving K–12 partners. Across these partnerships, we encountered moments of misalignment, miscommunication, and unintended harm—often shaped less by individual error than by institutional timelines, funding structures, and uneven power dynamics. Rather than treating these moments as private failures, we approached them as sites of collective inquiry. Grounding our work in adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, disability justice principles of collective care by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and practices of community listening described by Rachel C. Jackson and Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune, we designed a session that centered reflection, storytelling, and shared sense-making.

Participants were invited into a facilitated process of narrating their own experiences of community-engaged “failure.” Through reflective prompts and storytelling practices, they examined where communication broke down, institutional pressures compromised relational care, and well-intentioned projects risked reproducing the inequities they sought to disrupt. Crucially, we resisted the impulse to translate struggle into success, instead allowing these stories to remain complex, unfinished, and situated.

What emerged was a temporary community of care, grounded in listening and mutual recognition. Participants expressed relief at having space to speak openly without fear of professional consequence. In this context, failure became not a deficit to be overcome, but an integral dimension of ethical community-engaged work.

By foregrounding error as a shared and generative experience, we hoped to contribute to broader conversations in community writing about care, accountability, and sustainability. By making room for imperfection, we open up more space for growth in our community partnerships.