){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
All people have experienced some setbacks that prevent them from moving forward to achieve their goals, and it is more common than we think. These lessons help us overcome obstacles, failures, or mistakes to achieve our goals and objectives. Given this reality, the idea of the project called “MisHaps” arose at the Prepa Tec Campus Morelia. Mishap is the diminutive of the English word mishappening, which can mean setback. This project emerged to help students reflect on failure and turn it into a lesson for life. We relied on the Japanese Kintsugi technique, which repairs broken ceramics with gold, making them more beautiful and appreciated. It has become a philosophy of life, making an analogy between our mistakes or failures and the learning that transforms us to be stronger in facing life’s challenges.
Students must learn from their failures and mistakes; otherwise, they will block success in all areas of their lives. MisHaps is a project to recognize failure as part of the path to success. It fosters in the students an entrepreneurial, innovative, and value-generating mentality. Under Tecnologico de Monterrey’s Tec21 educational model, students work on communication and self-management skills that are fundamental for life.
“We understand entrepreneurship as the attitudes and skills required by those who want to be agents of change, who are not satisfied with the status quo and are willing to take action to change it” – (Tecnologico de Monterrey, 2020).
The pressure of society on adolescents to achieve “perfection.”
Modern Western society strives to make perfection seem “something easy” to achieve. Social magazines show perfect bodies, faces, and hair. Billboards and advertisements suggest many paths to perfection, hinting that some of them may be for us and, if not? Social media shows perfect hobbies, homes, lives, and outfits, in short, the bubble of the perfect world. However, sooner or later, people realize that life is not perfect, that we are far from perfection, and that mistakes and failures hurt us and can keep us from attaining our goals if we do not reflect on the lessons these leave us.
Every educational institution should teach its student community that mistakes are a source of learning that helps us grow as people. We must guide students in managing obstacles, taking risks in the face of errors, and learning self-management to develop better self-esteem. Students should know that, in class, mistakes are allowed, and teachers must prepare themselves to provide continuous feedback that is effective for each of them.
80% of young people in Mexico feel pressured to perform to please others and seek perfection, which makes them more afraid of failure. 75% agree that social media contributes to this sentiment. However, experience and this same study show that persevering in the face of failure is fundamental to learning and acquiring new skills (MSLGROUP Research, 2017).
Failure and error are relevant to learning
We often find failure a threat to our egos; we ignore the risk and danger factors around us, even though this information can save our lives. By not identifying the barriers, we cannot address or overcome them. Therefore, we must pay attention to the lessons our mistakes provide us since they are essential to improve and succeed.
If we avoid and evade failure, we reject feedback, seeing it as a direct personal attack and not as something positive for improvement (Bandura, 1983).
Failure helps us to infer our aptitudes and our lack of control over the circumstances of life, thus learning that we cannot control certain circumstances that happen around us or the decisions made by other people; however, we can control our decisions and the lessons learned from the barriers we confront and the mistakes we make. The opposite situation is the person who does not recognize that he has failed and ignores it, having a conceited and egocentric personality, thinking they are better than others and consistently successful (Seligman, 1975) (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2022).
When failures seem ordinary, there is a better chance of identifying and learning from them. We learn from the failures of others differently than we learn from our own. Setbacks allow us to learn. The sooner and clearer we see what has not gone well, the faster we can remedy it and learn from the mistake to avoid repeating it, putting things in perspective.
Meet Prepa Tec’s “MisHaps” initiative for students
The first step was explaining the philosophy behind the Japanese kintsugi technique to the students. We provided them some time to think about some setbacks they had during their three years of high school from which they gained significant learning. With this information, they produced a script for a four-to-five-minute video using two to five supporting images. They subsequently shared the experience of living through that setback or MisHap on a YouTube Live Stream. Students developed writing, interpreting, and communication skills. We also held weekly sessions with seven students who presented to the group. In the end, we did a round of questions and answers. It was a revitalizing exercise to recognize that our mistakes allow us to learn and improve. It prevents recidivism by putting facts into perspective and shows us how vulnerability can turn into strength and beauty.
The specific objectives of the project were that students could:
- Recognize that failure does not define the person.
- Reinforce the values of integrity and the ability to face new situations.
- Learn not to treat themselves harshly in the face of adversity.
- Know how to discern without losing the sense of what is truly important.
- Focus attention on their strengths.
- Persevere, acknowledging and accepting their mistakes and others’.
- Use live streaming technology to foster communication competency.
Audiovisual content creation and dissemination served to communicate ideas, interact, and socialize, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of platforms and social networks to share video content, such as YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Stream Yard, OBS Studio, and others, increased exponentially in recent years, establishing the position of the content creator with tremendous relevance in the labor and educational fields (Castillo-Abdul et al., 2020).
In the educational field, live video transmission as a didactic tool develops students’ writing, interpretation, and communication skills required in producing audiovisual pieces focused on entertainment where non-verbal language, scene composition, and video editing occur. Through this internship, students acquire relevant experience and skills for their future (López-Navarrete et al., 2021).
Results of the activity
At the end of the activities described in this article, we applied a satisfaction survey to the 120 students who attended the social entrepreneurship class in the January- May 2022 semester. The satisfaction survey employed a Likert scale of 1 to 5, where five was very satisfactory and one unsatisfactory; the mean was 4.98, with a standard deviation of 0.52. Students mentioned that they liked the activity mainly because it showed them that everyone has setbacks and challenges at any given time but also desires to thrive, be supportive, and learn from others.
Also, they acquired relevant skills for their future, such as working on non-verbal language, stage composition, video editing, and applying effects or animations, preparing them for their future.
Likewise, the tools to create video content and live broadcasts can apply to any discipline. Teachers and students only need basic training to explore before activities start. Remember that free, massively used tools always require slight changes for improvement so that anyone can use them. We invite the reader to leave us comments on this article, replicate this experience in the classroom, and share the experience through the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education of Tec de Monterrey.
About the authors
Arlette Audiffred Hinojosa (arlette.audiffred@itesm.mx ) is a professor in the Multicultural Program at Prepa Tec Campus Morelia. She teaches Chemistry and Social Entrepreneurship and collaborates on educational innovation projects at Tecnologico de Monterrey. Her Edubits publications in the IFE Observatory are Whatsapp for Education, Chemistry Lab in TikTok, Virtual Reality for the Study of Human Anatomy, Filmmakers 360, My Best Story: videos in Volumes, Achieve Pedagogical Objectives integrating Google Tools, How to produce videos with narrative audiovisual content in volume for class? Serious games for education, Molecular gastronomy for teaching chemistry, and Returning to classes with traditional Mexican games
Lizbeth Enriqueta Hernández Aguilar (lizbeth.hernandez@tec.mx ) is the director of the Academic Department of Development and Tutoring. She is also a mentor and teaches Development and Tutoring classes at Prepa Tec Campus Morelia. She also coordinates the Model United Nations TECMUN and Debate Triathlon academic activities. Her Edu bits publication in the IFE Observatory is Returning to Classes with Traditional Mexican Games.
Acknowledgments
The authors of this article acknowledge the financial and technical support of the Writing Lab of the Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in the production of this work. We also thank the cognitive psychologist Tzihueriti J. Castillo Correa, MA, for supporting this project and Ezequiel García Béjar, Innovation leader of the CEDDIE at the Guadalajara Campus.
References
Bandura, A., & Cervone, D. (1983). Self-evaluative and self-efficacy mechanisms governing the motivational effects of goal systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(5), 1017–1028. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.5.1017
Castillo-Abdul, B., Romero-Rodríguez, L. M., & Larrea-Ayala, A. (2020). Niños influencers en España: comprender los temas que abordan y el compromiso de los preadolescentes con sus canales de YouTube.Gamberro,6(9), e05056.
Crissy, L. & HtetAung, H. (2020). Artes Visuales y Humanidades Digitales.
Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511–1524. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211059817
López-Navarrete, A. J., Cabrera-Méndez, M., Díez-Somavilla, R. & Calduch-Losa, Á. (2021). Fórmula para medir el engagement del espectador en YouTube: investigación exploratoria sobre los principales youtubers españoles. Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación,12(1), 143-156.
Manso, J., Ezquerra, A., Burgos, M. E., Mafokozi, J. (2019). Análisis del tratamiento de contenidos en la creación de audiovisuales educativos. Revista Eureka sobre Enseñanza y Divulgación de las Ciencias 16(1), 1601 (2019)
Martin, E. P., & Seligman, W. H. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death.
MSLGROUP Research (2017). The Always Confidence & Puberty Wave V Study, based on females aged 16-24. https://news.pg.com/news-releases/news-details/2017/Survey-Finds-Half-of-Girls-Feel-Paralyzed-by-the-Fear-of-Failure-during-Puberty1-New-Always-LikeAGirl-Video-Aims-to-Change-This-and-Encourages-Girls-Everywhere-to-Keep-Going-LikeAGirl/default.aspx
Romero Castaño, M. (2021). Iniciación a la creación de contenidos audiovisuales en Educación Secundaria.
Tecnologico de Monterrey. (s. f.-a). Academic Direction. https://tec.mx/es/emprendimiento/formacion-emprendedora
Tecnologico de Monterrey. (s. f.). Entrepreneurship . https://tec.mx/es/emprendimiento Wu, M. y Gao, Q. (2020). Uso de la transmisión de video en vivo en la tutoría en línea: exploración de los factores que afectan la interacción social. Revista internacional de interacción humano-computadora,36(10), 964-977.
Editing
Edited by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Editor of the Edu bits articles and producer of The Observatory webinars- “Learning that inspires” – Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education at Tec de Monterrey.
Translation
Daniel Wetta
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
