{"id":33487,"date":"2015-11-07T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-07T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33487"},"modified":"2015-11-05T11:28:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T16:28:49","slug":"the-demand-for-trigger-warnings-may-make-teaching-difficult-subjects-practically-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/07\/the-demand-for-trigger-warnings-may-make-teaching-difficult-subjects-practically-impossible\/","title":{"rendered":"The demand for trigger warnings may make teaching “difficult” subjects practically impossible"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Salon<\/em>, Rani Neutill<\/a> explains what happened in the class she taught where she provided exactly the sort of trigger warnings in advance of all potentially disturbing material:<\/p>\n

About a year ago I was asked to teach a class about the evolution of the representation of sex throughout American Cinema. I started with the silent film (The Cheat<\/em>) and ended with Spike Jonze\u2019s disembodied sex in Her<\/em>. Along the way, I showed a number of sexually graphic films that caused a great deal of controversy.<\/p>\n

At the time I was teaching the course, I was also figuring out a life outside of academia. I had been a wandering postdoc for a long time and was tired. A friend of mine had recently been violently sexually assaulted. I was a witness. The trauma she suffered, from the assault and the long, drawn-out trial of her assailants, led me to volunteer at my local rape crisis center. Working directly with folks who have experienced trauma, I entered the course believing in trigger warnings and gave them throughout the class, even though it seemed as though the title of the course was a trigger warning in and of itself. Regardless, I gave them for almost every film I showed. I even gave them for films that really shouldn\u2019t have needed them (i.e., Psycho<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Midway through the semester, because of my work in sexual assault prevention, I was asked to fill in for the Director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention Services at the university. The Director had to take a short leave so I was there to fill in temporarily. In accepting the position, I took on a dual role. First, I was an activist against sexual violence, supporting survivors on campus, but I was also an educator who believed that learning is about shaking up one\u2019s world and worldview. I didn\u2019t realize that occupying both roles at once would be impossible; failure was inevitable. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I began class by talking briefly about learning through discomfort. The students were silent. I turned to them for questions about moments of feeling uncomfortable and how we could read these as productive. The student who came to my office raised her hand and asked, \u201cAre we gonna talk about SSBAS<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d I said, \u201cbut I want us to talk about any of the films that made people uncomfortable. Let\u2019s discuss the discomfort.\u201d Her face fell. She started crying and ran out of the room. Her friend followed her. Right after she left I showed the scene with Omar. Later that day, she came to my office again, sobbing.<\/p>\n

For the rest of the semester, I gave trigger warnings before every scene I screened. Every. Single. One. This wasn\u2019t enough. A student came to me and asked that I start sending emails before class outlining exactly which disturbing scenes I would be showing so that I wouldn\u2019t \u201cout\u201d survivors if they had to walk out of class when hearing what I was about to show. This took all the free form and off the cuff ability to teach. It stifled the teaching process. There would never be a moment for me to educate them by confronting them with the unknown, by helping them become aware of their own biases by making them feel uncomfortable. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Salon, Rani Neutill explains what happened in the class she taught where she provided exactly the sort of trigger warnings in advance of all potentially disturbing material: About a year ago I was asked to teach a class about the evolution of the representation of sex throughout American Cinema. I started with the silent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[956,238,1025,764],"class_list":["post-33487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-millennials","tag-offensensitivity","tag-triggerwarnings","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8I7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33488,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33487\/revisions\/33488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}