Trigger warnings, trauma, and teaching (original) (raw)
Related papers
Uncoddling the American Mind: The Educational Ask of Trigger Warnings
Philosophy of Education , 2020
Over the last few years there has been growing attention to the work of schools-be it primary, secondary, or tertiary-as they provide (or fail to provide) students an education that is safe and inclusive. The rise of "safe spaces" and the development of practices that attend to the diverse student body have led to a veritable explosion of research, opinions, and debates about the contemporary state of education and its subjects. A central concept within this conversation is the rise of and request for trigger warnings. The "trigger warning"-a request for a pre-emptive warning about difficult material that could trigger past trauma-has often come to act as a stand-in that represents the larger fragile new world that places of learning have supposedly become. Students, within this context, have become snowflakes while faculty have become frightened of, or resistant to, students. However, rather than bemoan the rise of trigger warnings, so often done in op-ed pages and other journalistic sites, I argue that the request for trigger warnings by students represents an important educational ask. In this paper, I offer an argument that centralizes and unpacks the educational ask of trigger warnings, moving to the side of political and therapeutic discourses that have dominated how to receive the requests for trigger warnings.
Conceal and Carry: Communicating about Trauma, Triggers, and Second Assaults in the Classroom
2018
SECTION 6.6 (IM)POSSIBLE FUTURE ARTICULATIONS….…………………………………………… CHAPTER ONE The Scope of the Trigger Warning Debate 2013 was "the year of trigger warnings," according to Slate Magazine. 1 Though the term dates back to the early twentieth century, "trigger warnings" gained traction within online feminist communities in the 1990s. 2 Trigger warnings are disclaimers or forewarnings that alert audiences that content contains the potential for negative affective responses. 3 Often, they are used before exposing audiences to graphic or traumatic material, such as depictions of sexual violence. 4 Trigger warnings, I argue, are a visible marker of the need for a corrective response to a pervasive rape culture. 5
Beyond Trigger Warnings: Working towards a strengths-based, trauma-informed model of resilience in the university creative writing workshop Abstract: The creative writing workshop is an environment that relies on intimacy, empathy, trust, and connection. While the writer's workshop in the university is not a therapeutic space, it is not a place of emotional neutrality. The way students experience the workshop as a place of safety or risk can affect their capacity to learn. How do we promote resilience among our students, particularly those experiencing mental ill-health or trauma? While trigger warnings may have a place in creating a safe space, they risk drawing attention to negative emotions and negative experiences, narrowing the focus of the threatened individual, and this may have the unwanted effect of reducing the capacity to learn. This paper explores two frameworks for a strengths-based model of trauma-informed practice in the creative writing workshop that builds on positive emotions, positive meaning, autonomy, competence and social relatedness.
2020
May 5th, 2016, during conversation with a former colleague who had been evacuated from Fort McMurray, Alberta due to a devastating forest fire, I began to wonder more deeply about teachers' experiences in the midst of trauma and trauma sensitivity, particularly as I sensed trauma sensitivity was increasingly becoming an added expectation that many teachers were experiencing. Following the fire and this conversation with a former colleague, I awakened to how frequently I was hearing the terms trauma and trauma sensitivity in multiple and diverse contexts, and yet I could not answer the question: What does it mean to be trauma sensitive? I thus engaged in a 2-year narrative inquiry alongside three teachers as coinquirers through which we inquired into a research puzzle focused on how teachers' personal and professional contexts, knowledge, and identities (conceptualized narratively in this dissertation as stories to live by) are shaped by and shape their experiences of/with trauma. The coinquirers and I engaged in living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998b) alongside each other through multiple face-to-face conversations and via digital communication. Through this dialogue we co-composed and inquired into diverse field texts that included the transcripts of our conversations, drawings, and memory box artifacts (Clandinin, 2013). Three narrative accounts, one for each co-inquirer, were co-composed, from which reverberating resonant threads emerged. As coinquirers, we came to understand that we compose our lives in the midst of experience. Slowly attending to the wholeness of lives, rather than trauma as an experience in isolation, surfaced tensions with the more dominant stories that homogenize iii and pathologize trauma as a single and defining story (Adichie, 2009). This wideawakeness (Greene, 1995) also drew us to wonder with the more dominant institutional narratives of the categorization of behaviours as identity markers (i.e. the practice of assessing and assigning codes to children and youth). We also wondered with the professional pressures to be often resulting from one-time professional development that travels to teachers through the metaphorical conduit (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Craig, 2001). We wondered if and how programs of trauma sensitivity bump against, smooth out, and/or silence the multilayered and complex experiences that are shaped by and shaping teachers' making of their lives in and outside of schools. By 'world'-travelling to others' worlds with a loving perception (Lugones, 1987), through living, telling, retelling and reliving our stories, we came to a narrative understanding of trauma as shaping, but also as being shaped by, our knowledge, contexts, and identities, that is, our stories to live by (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). Together, we called attention to how we were continually composing our lives as searches for, or as struggles with, narrative coherence (Carr, 1986). We saw this understanding as opening possibilities for more narrative conceptualizations of trauma, trauma stories, and stories of trauma as we, as teachers, continue to come alongside each other, children and youth, colleagues, families, curriculum makers, policy developers, and others on school landscapes.
The academically destructive nature of trigger warnings
First Amendment Studies, 2016
Trigger warnings are the latest concession to the notion espoused by some students and progressive professors that learning, particularly in higher education, should be pain-free psychologically. Such a premise is antithetical to the values of academic freedom and the marketplace of ideas and is inconsistent with students' learning and confronting ideas with which they are unfamiliar and which are outside of their comfort zone. Yielding to demands for trigger warnings when exposing students to ideas, topics and exchanges that may become uncomfortable negates growth for students. In short, acquiescing to the self-serving demands for trigger warnings makes education nothing but the reaffirming of ideas and positions with which students enter the academy. This article may upset undergraduates and progressive faculty and administrators…deal with it.
Meniscus, 2023
Seymour, J (2023) ‘Writing Trauma’, Meniscus, 11(1), pp: 134-136