Going back to the flaming dumpster: Revisiting experiential exercises gone awry.

failure, garbage fire, humility

MOBTS has a rich history of sharing positive experiences with experiential learning exercises, and since 2017 when we first had a Garbage Fire session, there has been a growing history of learning from each other when our efforts, while possibly innovative, didn’t succeed. In this session, we invite attendees to reflect on experiential activities that had unintended outcomes, and building off previous sessions and the experiences we’ve both presented and learned from, we plan on exploring with attendees how instructor humility can serve as a path from the garbage fire to safe, burn-free existence. Additionally, this year, we plan to explore our own and our attendees’ experiences that resulted in a classroom failure, but that we (and they) have revised and tried again. It is this resilience, whether from attending our sessions, or one’s own persistence (stubbornness?), that we are hoping to encourage in the Garbage Fire sessions.