Embracing Failure in the Drama Classroom.

Inspired by Valerie Curtis-Newton's keynote address at the 2023 AATE conference, this piece explores the necessity of creating failure-friendly drama classrooms. In a time when students are experiencing unprecedented rates of anxiety and other mental health challenges, I argue that explicit instruction about and opportunities for failure are necessary for the social, emotional, and academic success of students. Furthermore, I address why drama educators and theatre classrooms are uniquely positioned to facilitate healthy relationships with failure. I end the piece with suggestions for ways to incorporate more failurelearning opportunities into drama and theatre education spaces. "Prepare for the best and be secure in your ability to survive the worst," I scrawled fervently in my notebook as I watched Valerie Curtis Newton's keynote address at the 2023 AATE conference in Seattle (Curtis-Newton, 2023). Curtis Newton's career as a director, educator, and champion of African-American performance in the U.S. is prolific. While she gave us, her captive audience of educators and artists, some insight into her illustrious career, she chose to focus her talk on the anxiety epidemic with which many of our students struggle and theatre's ability to teach our students (and ourselves) to be brave. She urged us to model courage and curiosity for students. She spoke of the creative process as a balm to the wounds of self-doubt and paralyzing pessimism. She reminded us that risk and resilience are essential to the creative process. While she never explicitly said the word "failure," I found myself coming back to that word again, and again, scribbling it in my notebook, circling it, and tracing the letters to create deep grooves in the paper. Teaching young people to take risks and navigate the outcomes of those risks is one of the most important skills educators can offer, especially in a time of extreme anxiety. In this essay, I present the anxious context young people face, review the literature on how drama and theatre can support resilience, share some examples of successful and unsuccessful failure stories from a decade of teaching artistry, and offer some tools for drama and theatre educators that want to recenter failure in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]