Trigger warnings as respect for student boundaries in university classrooms

ABSTRACT

The fierce public and scholarly debate over trigger warnings in university classrooms has often characterized the issue as one of academic freedom and ignored the social justice arguments for trigger warnings. In this essay, we argue that trigger warnings expand academic speech by engaging students more fully in their own learning. Specifically, we understand trigger warnings as a means of respecting students’ intellectual, emotional, and physical boundaries. By framing trigger warnings in this way, we argue that they are tools of worldmaking to the degree that they promise to improve accessibility, engage students better in learning, and cultivate more socially just and livable campuses.

Notes

1. By “safe space,” what we mean is precisely not refuge from new ideas or ideas with which students disagree. Instead, we mean spaces in which students are free to explore their own views about a topic, including disagreeing with each other and with a professor, as long as they do not engage in willful hate speech or character attacks. In a safe space, students (and faculty!) are not shielded from the world but are instead invited into it, with the chance to grow and expand based on respectful conversation and feedback.

2. In a related point, Rebecca Stringer (2016) highlights that the equivalent of trigger warnings exists in other contexts without controversy. For example, before medical students work on cadavers for the first time, they receive training about emotional boundaries. We would add that in all manner of helping professions (social workers, counselors, clergy), training in boundaries and self-care functions as a routine and thoroughly necessary part of the work people do in their preparatory education and in continuing education seminars.

Additional information

Funding

Miami University Committee on Faculty Research.

Notes on contributors

Leland G. Spencer

Leland G. Spencer (PhD, University of Georgia, 2013) is associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies and affiliate faculty in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University. He is author of Women Bishops and Rhetorics of Shalom (Lexington, 2017) and co-editor of Transgender Communication Studies (Lexington, 2015). Leland has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles in outlets such as Communication Studies, Women & Language, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, Equity and Excellence in Education, and others.

Theresa A. Kulbaga

Theresa A. Kulbaga(PhD, The Ohio State University, 2006) is associate professor in the Department of English and affiliate faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the American Studies Program at Miami University. Her research appears in several academic journals, including World Economic Review, Prose Studies, College English, Literacy Research, and others.