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It feels like wasted effort in this context then. The article talks a lot about the university setting specifically, you can't just not engage with your course

It feels like wasted effort in this context then. The article talks a lot about the university setting specifically, you can't just not engage with your course material and expect to have the same educational outcomes as someone who did. It seems like it'd be more effective for majors to list their trigger warnings before the course even starts with the understanding that if you can't handle the content then you should probably choose a difference major. Likewise, it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted.

crooked-v 7y ago
I feel like even with courses taken as a given, there's still some measure of common courtesy there in stuff like "in week 2 you're going to see a pretty gross safety video, don't eat lunch beforehand".
lilyball 7y ago
Yes you can. You can choose to skip a particular lecture if it's covering particularly triggering topics. If the lecture is particularly important, you can approach the professor about dealing with the lecture content in a more sensitive one-on-one context, or see if the lecture is recorded such that you can watch it later when you have more mental spoons to deal with it. > it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted Teachers should not be making their students uncomfortable (let alone triggering trauma) by surprise. This is a consent issue.
- 2804t3qwp 7y ago
  Why is this a consent issue? Lots of intro to sociology classes do a lesson on the Nacirema, race and violence are massive components of studying mid 20th century literature, and plenty of other fields of study have lessons that are meant to convey an emotional context and not just an informational one and they do this often with surprise elements. Labeling that as traumatic and non-consensual glosses over the part where the main people who seem to be reporting trauma from these lessons are people who already had trauma and are clearly still influenced heavily by it or they wouldn't need trigger warnings. Calling it a consent issue frankly is just a dog whistle. And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? The professor already selected the information they felt was relevant and presented it in the fashion they felt was the most useful to the class. Your viewpoint only seems to make sense if the default assumption is that emotional information isn't a priority for the instructor but that doesn't jive with how a large swathe of the humanities and social sciences are often taught.
  - watwut 7y ago
    > And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? Reality check: so that you distinguish yourself from the slackers who did not came, because they did not felt like going. And there are always those. Second, it is contra argument against "will not learn something important" argument. Visit teacher during open hours to learn that important thing. In all likelyhood, there is no massive thing to catch up with. Typically these are materials that are mean to make the issue of violence and rape less academic to students - seeing bodies makes it more real then reading about bodies. It is mostly emotional impact that is avoided. Even if emotional impact is priority, emotional impact on person we are talking about is different then emotional impact on me. The material works completely differvently way for them. Typically, the violent material is shown to students so that they break naive bubbles of how easy it is. People we talk about knows about it more then a student after seeing it.
watwut 7y ago
What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise? It is one of those arguments that make these all discussions completely outside of my experience. I never seen material that would be harmed by that. Not even movies and I hate spoilers. I was never triggered. I was never triggered by trigger warning either, I just don't care. For all I know, veterans and raped or abused people can have all the warnings they want and nothing whatsoever changes for me. They can not have them and nothing whatsoever changes for me. These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. And the hostility of the whole debate from anyone except those few directly affected is puzzling. Like, one 100 people will skip that one lecture that has detailed depiction of rape. Big deal. Plus traditionally, education went out of its way to euphemise rapes and sex generally away. Like, calling using the word rape to characterize rape in old text did not used to be common. They used to prefer to talk about it in codes.
- 2804t3qwp 7y ago
  >What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise? It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots. With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection. Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context. Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group. >These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).

crooked-v 7y ago

I feel like even with courses taken as a given, there's still some measure of common courtesy there in stuff like "in week 2 you're going to see a pretty gross safety video, don't eat lunch beforehand".

lilyball 7y ago

Yes you can. You can choose to skip a particular lecture if it's covering particularly triggering topics. If the lecture is particularly important, you can approach the professor about dealing with the lecture content in a more sensitive one-on-one context, or see if the lecture is recorded such that you can watch it later when you have more mental spoons to deal with it. > it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted Teachers should not be making their students uncomfortable (let alone triggering trauma) by surprise. This is a consent issue.

2804t3qwp 7y ago
Why is this a consent issue? Lots of intro to sociology classes do a lesson on the Nacirema, race and violence are massive components of studying mid 20th century literature, and plenty of other fields of study have lessons that are meant to convey an emotional context and not just an informational one and they do this often with surprise elements. Labeling that as traumatic and non-consensual glosses over the part where the main people who seem to be reporting trauma from these lessons are people who already had trauma and are clearly still influenced heavily by it or they wouldn't need trigger warnings. Calling it a consent issue frankly is just a dog whistle. And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? The professor already selected the information they felt was relevant and presented it in the fashion they felt was the most useful to the class. Your viewpoint only seems to make sense if the default assumption is that emotional information isn't a priority for the instructor but that doesn't jive with how a large swathe of the humanities and social sciences are often taught.
- watwut 7y ago
  > And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? Reality check: so that you distinguish yourself from the slackers who did not came, because they did not felt like going. And there are always those. Second, it is contra argument against "will not learn something important" argument. Visit teacher during open hours to learn that important thing. In all likelyhood, there is no massive thing to catch up with. Typically these are materials that are mean to make the issue of violence and rape less academic to students - seeing bodies makes it more real then reading about bodies. It is mostly emotional impact that is avoided. Even if emotional impact is priority, emotional impact on person we are talking about is different then emotional impact on me. The material works completely differvently way for them. Typically, the violent material is shown to students so that they break naive bubbles of how easy it is. People we talk about knows about it more then a student after seeing it.

watwut 7y ago

What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise? It is one of those arguments that make these all discussions completely outside of my experience. I never seen material that would be harmed by that. Not even movies and I hate spoilers. I was never triggered. I was never triggered by trigger warning either, I just don't care. For all I know, veterans and raped or abused people can have all the warnings they want and nothing whatsoever changes for me. They can not have them and nothing whatsoever changes for me. These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. And the hostility of the whole debate from anyone except those few directly affected is puzzling. Like, one 100 people will skip that one lecture that has detailed depiction of rape. Big deal. Plus traditionally, education went out of its way to euphemise rapes and sex generally away. Like, calling using the word rape to characterize rape in old text did not used to be common. They used to prefer to talk about it in codes.

2804t3qwp 7y ago
>What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise? It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots. With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection. Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context. Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group. >These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).