No, I don’t. But if you’re going to make flip statements at me, you’re going to get them right back at you. Students don’t always have a lot of control about where they attend college or whether they can transfer after they start attending. Try seeing things from a student’s point of view, and not just yours.
I don’t know that they’re a better service for me personally, but I don’t really get triggered like that. I see trigger warnings and content notes frequently on the internet and they don’t bug me. I just ignore them.
But, it’s completely valid for a consumer to determine what constitutes a better service for them. And if enough of consumers are asking for trigger warnings, then a school is going to have to figure out a way to accommodate it. I’ve complained about other things at the schools I attended, because I did not feel that I was getting good value for my money. The people who want trigger warnings are doing the same thing, and their opinion about what constitutes a good education for them shouldn’t just be dismissed out of hand.
Agreed–I read the aforementioned Things Fall Apart in a high school history course, too. Most high school students read The Great Gatsby and Huck Finn (both mentioned in the piece as potentially needing a warning).
Is it possible that the students don’t actually know what’s best for them? I know that sounds bad, but I don’t know a better way to say it. What if all the students said that they don’t think there should be tests anymore. They should get A’s just for attending class. Of course, it’s a long road from here to there and at some point the a degree from that school is going to carry less weight but that’'s something the administration has to keep in mind.
I haven’t totally made up my mind on the subject yet, but I think it’s forever going to be a grey area subject. I think it’s going to depend on the class. For example, if you’re taking a Cinematography class and they show Full Metal Jacket, I could understand the teacher giving the students a heads up that it’s a violent war movie that not only includes a deadly sniper scene but also include a murder/suicide that has nothing to do with the movie.
OTOH, if you’re taking a Stanly Kubric class, do you give the same warning? That movie loses some of it’s edge if you spoil those scenes.
So, again, I think I’ll go back to listing the course materiel before registration and let people decide on their own if they’re okay with it. The profs shouldn’t have to figure this out. If a student isn’t going to be okay with something it’s up them to take responsibility for that.
This sounds like a warning on one of the “Series of Unfortunate Events” books.
[QUOTE=Lemony Snicket]
Dear Reader,
I hope, for your sake, that you have not chosen to read this story because you are in the mood for a pleasant experience. If this is the case, I advise you to put it down instantaneously, because of all the books describing the unhappy lives of the Baudelaire orphans, The Miserable Mill might be the unhappiest yet. This book, I’m sorry to inform you, contains such unpleasantries as a giant pincher machine, a bad casserole, a man with a cloud of smoke where his head should be, a hypnotist, a terrible accident resulting in injury, and coupons.
[/QUOTE]
I hadn’t realized until now that such things were “trigger warnings.”
Well, if you’re going to treat them like children, they should be getting warnings. Children get G-rated movies, after all.
I don’t think you can argue both that they are adults who need to take responsibility for their own issues AND that they don’t know what’s best for them so someone has to control it for them.
Good point. The teacher cannot be expected to know everyone’s phobias, trauma history, desire to play the “helpless victim” card, etc. Should a bio teacher be expected to coddle my ophidiophobia beyond a “hey, this class does involve dealing with snakes, so be aware of that”?
Yeah, based on my own life history, I’m a bit uncomfortable with on-screen gunshot suicide or with material relating to pedophilia/child molestation, but it’s up to me to handle the matter as the survivor I choose to be rather than wallowing in traumatized victimhood. If I can’t do that with my own internal resources, it’s my responsibility to seek appropriate help, not the responsibility of the rest of the world to wrap me in cotton batting and bubble wrap and shelter me like a helpless child.
As I said when I first said that they need to take responsibility for themselves, that’s a lesson I’m working on teaching my 8 year old when she blames her mother (my ex-wife) for sending her to school without a hat. “You have to remember to grab it yourself, don’t blame mom, if it’s cold out just tell her you need it”.
Anyways, like I said, I knew that sounded bad, but remember, these are still adolescents. Some of these kids are just barely out of high school. Yes, they should take responsibility for themselves. That is, if they know that they can’t deal with rape scenes or violence against kids or bees, it should be on them to figure out (perhaps with the help of the instructor) if they’re going to encounter that during the semester.
Now there’s the other point I made, that perhaps they don’t know what’s best for them. Imagine if they whined enough and had all trigger warning worthy material removed from the school. No movies with rape scenes, no books with racism, no classes that suggested that religion isn’t real. At some point the education simply isn’t going to be as good as the school down the road. Yes, you could just go to the school down the road or the admins could say “Sorry, we’re not changing, we want to be better than they other school, we want to challenge young minds, broaden your horizons, the world is scary, rape and racism and bees happen and we’re going to make sure you graduate prepared to enter it”.
I don’t like this seller/buyer analogy. Like I mentioned earlier, what if the buyers just want A’s for simply showing up? What if they want decide they’re ‘triggered’ by differentials and want them removed from calculus? I suppose, with that analogy, at some point the admins can tell the problem customers to take a hike, most store owners have had to do it at one point or another.
You can’t have it both ways, BrightNShiny. Either the students are consumers, choosing between relevant options - quickest route to a job, cheapest I can find, broadest options or best teaching, or they are going to college for the experience of that environment, including instruction that might make them uncomfortable and work that might be challenging, and exposing themselves to a wide range of courses and topics. Students have way more options than instructors – if you can’t see that I don’t know what to tell you.
I was a student not all that long ago. I paid a lot of money for my education. I chose my classes a certain way. I would never have demanded my instructors teach me in a specific way, though – because part of going to college was fulfilling requirements, but it was also about learning. If we make decisions about how to teach by imagining students as consumers, we have to change the whole model of education, not just whether or not we have trigger warnings.
I think the consumerist model is a bit of a red herring, anyway. I think the trigger warning controversy, specifically, is coming from not so much a commercial concern but a desire to be More Right On Than Thou, a more longstanding problem in universities. Combining that with the special snowflake approach and the consumer model and a lot of the ways the system is messed up are created.
Eh? I’m not having it both ways. Students aren’t some monolithic group. You’re the one trying to extrapolate your own beliefs to the entire student body. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what to tell you.
And when I bought my car, I didn’t demand a GPS system in it, because at the time I didn’t care. And when I was looking for a townhouse, I wanted one with air conditioning, even though most people don’t care about that where I live. So what? You’ve created your own very specific definition of learning and think that everyone should follow it. Other students don’t agree.
It’s not an either or thing (what do you teach anyway, that you view the world in such black-and-white terms?) Students are consumers, and a university should take that into account. It doesn’t mean that’s the only analysis that needs to be done, but it means it’s part of the analysis.
Yes, of course, it’s possible. People make bad decisions all the time.
Instead of tests, what about grades? Some universities don’t do grades. Some don’t publish rankings. Some don’t publish grades below a certain cutoff. All of that strikes me a bit odd, but there are some people who like these policies and think they get a good education from them.
And I have taken classes which had no tests. And I’ve taken classes which had no assignments or any grades until one final at the end of the year. There already seems to be a lot of divergence in teaching issues.
I’ve taken a bunch of film theory classes in my day, and we were all spoiled on movies, because we had reading assignments on them before class. I don’t believe creating shock or surprise in an individual is necessary to do critical analysis of art. But that’s probably a topic for another thread.
I’d be okay with that too. But I’d be okay with trigger warnings as well.
A competence-based education model that separated the delivery of education from its evaluation could help. In order to get a degree, you would have to demonstrate or otherwise prove X competences. There are a bunch of ways you could pick up a competency (i.e. go from a brain-dead slob to someone who actually knows something) - take a class at State U (and pay the tuition there), hire a private tutor, study with friends, hit the books on your own, etc. If you took the cheap route and studied for the “The student shall demonstrate knowledge of 20th century history and the ability to analyze major historical events for their significance and effect on the 21st century” requirement and avoided the Holocaust, then boo hoo, you fail your competency evaluation and won’t get your degree until you open that book, or watch that movie, etc., and learn what really happened.
See, it comes as the exact opposite to me. Which side is advocating for change? Which side is belittling the feelings of others? Which side is saying that they have to be prepared for the real world? Which side is clinging to a status quo is usually unnecessary? Which side is freaked out about possible legislation or otherwise being “forced”? Which side is catastrophizing, using fear of horrible consequences as their motivation?
All these students are asking for is a heads up about certain commonly disturbing topics discussed in disturbing ways. It’s a common courtesy we have not only online, but in our media. Movies, TV, video games–they are all rated. Viewer discretion warnings abound.
I have trouble coming up with situations where someone learns better by being surprised rather than being given information up front. I could see artists not wanting to give warnings, but teachers? Their goal is to teach, not to create experiences.
Everyone is making it seem harder than it is, creating straw warnings that need to be catered to, using obvious slippery slope arguments. It’s not all that hard to warn someone when something obviously disturbing might be present, and we’ve been doing it for a very long time. It’s no harder to think of what ideas might reasonably disturb people than it is to think of what words you probably shouldn’t say.
If I were to start graphically describing a rape here, I would get slapped hard for being a jerk. I reasonably know that there are people here who have had traumatic experiences with rape. I’m not going to sit here and discuss a morose suicide in great detail. Heck, if I were to talk about certain biological functions, I would be thought a jerk by some for not saying TMI ahead of time.
There’s just no reason that teachers should be exempt from the common courtesies extended by the rest of the world. If they can come up with a valid reason that the students need to be surprised in order to learn, more power to them. But most of the time it’s inconsequential or worse, intentionally designed to disturb.
I’m not saying students need to be surprised, I’m just saying that it should be their responsibility to know their own emotions and prepare themselves to face things that might make them uncomfortable. Information is out there.
Trigger warnings are pretty paternalistic. And, again, unhelpful for people who might actually be triggered, given how PTSD works.
I’m not being black-and-white about this; I just think that the kind of thinking which would mandate trigger warnings is antithetical to what university education should be about. Of course students should be able to choose whether or not to take a course based on what it covers; having the syllabus, or at least the book list, available ahead of time is not unusual or crazy.
A real life example: a friend of a friend was teaching a course on Homosexuality in Film. Students were upset and offended when they watched a movie that included a homosexual sex-scene. Should the teacher have included a trigger warning there?
Like it or not, we already live in that model, where the students are the consumers purchasing their education. That has to be the case in any situation when primary source of funding is from tuition. And yet none of your catastrophic ideas have come to pass.
A student who wants automatic As on all tests would not get useful education, and their degree would be worthless. That’s why that particular nightmare hasn’t happened.
And I hope you realize that your “remove all controversial subjects” is an idea of your own making, and not one that anyone actually advocates for. The most I’ve ever seen is a call to reevaluate whether certain content really is useful.
And all that is being advocated here is providing information so students can be prepared and not blindsided by disturbing content.
But what do you do when student expectations and the norms of the discipline conflict? As I said, I have dealt with student complaints about instructors showing ‘pornographic’ work in art class- classical and medieval sculpture and painting. Or, an instructor ‘persecuting Christians’ by teaching evolution in an introductory Biology class.
Everyone has a line. Should educators be responsible for monitoring every possible point of offense? There is no good way to differentiate between valid and invalid when it comes to people reacting poorly to subject material, so we end up with these boilerplate CYA statements.
I think the issue here is that it used to be assumed that you would find material in every discipline that challenged your worldview; but now, educators are supposed to provide handy warning signs so that students can circumvent this. They want the data points devoid of any surrounding value system, and I can see why academics would bristle at the concept.
I think we need to dial it back here a minute. There is a lot of middle ground between total nerfing of education and violent rape scenes with your Cheerios. The original idea here is a simple heads up, so that the relatively few people who do have issues can not be blindsided. I think in most contexts (work, watching a movie with friends, etc.) it’s normal courtesy to give a quick warning.
The place where you prove your competence by doing stuff is called “work.”
I suppose it depends on the major. I would expect that a biology major has to study evolution or an art major has to study medieval art. But, a lot of universities do require their students to take classes unrelated to their majors, and I wonder if some of this triggering issue is coming up because of those types of requirements. I’m looking at UCLA’s Electrical Engineering requirement now, and it looks like they require a bunch of arts and humanities courses. If universities are going to do this sort of thing, then maybe it’s not a bad idea to give a better heads up to their students.
Uh. Basically all universities require degree students to take a wide range of courses hitting a bit of the major disciplines. It’s called " general education" and it’s one of the main things that distinguish a university degree from a trade school or certification program.
Please don’t put that in quotes like it’s something I said. I didn’t say it, you did. You made up that phrase, I said nothing of the sort.
However, going off an “an idea of your own making” to remove all controversial subjects, that’s hardly something no one advocates for. Ever heard of a book ban? Plenty of people (though I’d guess it’s more politicians than students) would love to ban everything controversial.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here.