12:36am May 24, 2014

“Much of the negative reaction to trigger warnings seems to fall into two camps, fear about censorship and concern about coddling students. I sympathize with these concerns, which I think may be rooted in our shared experience of an increasingly corporatized university system where intellectual freedom may be under a slow assault. Yes, there are many ways in which universities have come to see young people as customers to be attracted and appeased, not as students to be pushed and challenged. But I encourage other instructors to at least momentarily set aside political concerns and consider the issue from a pedagogical and ethical point of view. I think that something like a trigger warning can be a useful tool for creating a classroom environment that feels safe enough for students to be able to tackle difficult subjects.

[…]From an instructor’s point of view, I consider that students may be doing their homework at home–or in downtime at a workplace, in a public area like a library or cafeteria, side by side with friends or teammates in a group study session, or any number of other environments. They might be planning to go to work, or sleep, or a high-stakes exam after studying. If the reading I assigned might prompt a student to be overcome by a memory of being assaulted, to be taken with rage or sadness (whether from personal experience or not) at reading in depth about genocide, then would it be such a bad thing for the student to know that in advance and be able to plan their reading schedule accordingly?

Note that I said absolutely nothing about cutting uncomfortable readings out of my syllabus, despite that the media framing of this story sets up an opposition between assigning provocative readings and using trigger warnings.”

Trigger warnings and being responsible for your students | Processing Culture (via brutereason)

It’s strange it’s even a controversy in a school context.  When I was in school and we did plays that had guns in them, the program would always include a trigger warning for veterans. And this was not a school that was even good about disability.

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