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I agree that none of the examples I gave would lose much of their impact, but I'd argue that's also not directly tied in to the ovarching point I was trying to
by 2804t3qwp 7y ago
I agree that none of the examples I gave would lose much of their impact, but I'd argue that's also not directly tied in to the ovarching point I was trying to express (though obviously I expressed it badly or else that's where the focus would be).
It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surprise can be used as a catalyst for introspection or introducing a strategic amount of discomfort to illustrate a point, etc. the point I was trying to make is simply that it has utility. When you are /required/ to have a trigger warning, as an instructor, you are being obligated to compromise the effect you were trying to persue and presumably you were trying to persue it because you thought it would help the class with some form of comprehension whether that be intellectual or emotional.
Even if you're not outright required to issue trigger warnings (lets say because a middle ground policy is implemented that encourages instructors to do so but leaves it to their discretion) those instructors are still required to adapt to triggered students or else they wouldn't have been encouraged/required to do so in the first place. But because there's no reliable way to know what specific content will trigger a student in a given class the system is actually incentivizing censorship because now the only way to ensure you minimize trigger events is to assume that every student is triggerable and so optimal content becomes content which is as unchallenging, emotionally speaking, as possible.
Allergies wouldn't be a terrible analogy. Lots of schools, in America I can't speak for Europe and elsehwere, have regulations about common allergies like peanuts. These regulations are targeted towards common allergies because otherwise the task of preventing allergic reactions becomes an all encompassing battle to minimize liability. That's not to say students with rare allergies shouldn't be accommodated at all, but at some point the impact on the other students has to be addressed.
- watwut 7y agoWhat I am saying is that this is purely theoretical construct. That fine tuned impactful lesson that is so great, but breaks if I dont know the violence will be there, it does not exist. Not even art works that way. And if it does, it sounds awful lot like something manipulative. Minor red flag wtf is going on manipulative. It is supposed to be college lesson. Edit: I have seen trigger warning I lecture about American history from one of big schools (on youtube, they released it free). The lecturer just said "I will show violence" or some such and that was it. If you left the room, you would not get any special material. You would just avoid sight of dead mistreated people.
- 2804t3qwp 7y agoI'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but education as a field has a very large collection of practices that could easily be described as manipulation. At the same time, I'm worried manipulation seems like the right word because I've been focusing mainly on surprise content to establish a fast example for the discussion even though what I've really been trying to drive at is the way that trigger warnings and their implementation/expection impacts the teacher-student dynamic. I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice. You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.
- c22 7y agoIt sounds kind of silly, but this was a real problem for us when my preschooler went through a phase where he only ate peanut butter sandwiches. His preschool wouldn't let us pack them in his lunch despite none of the other kids in his class actually having peanut allergies. We threw away a lot of uneaten cheese sticks and apple slices that month.