By Sasha Glim
Debates over whether or not instructors should use trigger warnings in the classroom reveal a wide variety of differing opinions, but it is important to find the best solution in order to teach in a trauma-informed way, UC Santa Barbara students and faculty were told at a recent presentation.
Education systems as they are today aren’t using the best strategies to help traumatized students, said undergraduate research assistant Bethany Clements at the event, Trigger Warnings: An Undergraduate Perspective. “In other words, they do tend to cater to a stereotypical representation of trauma, and that perpetuates a primarily white, male, heterosexual understanding of educational material,” she said. Clements is a fourth year English, Linguistics, and Psychological & Brain Sciences triple major.
The talk was organized by UC Santa Barbara’s Literature and Mind research center, housed in the English Department, and its Trauma-Informed Pedagogy project. The event examined the current conversation and research around trigger warnings.
UCSB undergraduate student Bethany Clements starts her presentation on trigger warnings for the English department’s Literature and Mind Research Center.
Aili Pettersson Peeker, English Ph.D. student and research coordinator for the trauma-informed pedagogy project, said Clements had spent the past summer compiling information on the debate about trigger warnings in the United States, in order to find a way to teach potentially triggering content in way that will actually help undergraduate students.
“Clements has been helping us at the trauma informed pedagogy project to understand what people are saying about trigger warnings and how we can help people teach in a more trauma-informed way,” she said as she introduced the student speaker.
Clements said trigger warnings are an important heads-up for traumatized students. “It’s generally thought to be a preemptive statement used to protect students from exposure to content that may awaken past traumas or cause them intense emotional discomfort,” she said.
Some students may ask for trigger warnings when they feel that they need it. “Teachers need to be conscious that students who approach their professor for help are theoretically the most vulnerable,” said Clements. “It’s the responsibility of their instructors to meet their students where they’re at.”
Opponents of trigger warnings, such as the instructors of medical students, often claim that giving a trigger warning would be coddling their students, since the student won’t get any advance notice when, for example, a patient is wheeled into a hospital room, she said.
Aili Pettersson Peeker is an English Ph.D. student and the research coordinator for the Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project of UCSB’s English department
Clements explained that marginalized groups are often the most traumatized because of the discrimination they face in the classroom and throughout life. “Trigger warnings are not the problem, but they are also not the best solution when it comes to problems of white supremacy and addressing marginalized groups in the classroom,” she said. Instructors are labeled as socially conscious when they use trigger warnings even if they don’t do antiracist work to address white supremacy in the classroom, she explained.
Some solutions Clements proposed include course content notices far in advance and pre-recorded lectures that will allow students to engage with potentially triggering content at their own pace.
Clements also outlined the strategy called titration or scaffolding, in which instructors present students with manageable, small amounts of potentially triggering material at a time. “This would allow medical students to build resistance to engaging with traumatic material over time before they are put into the workforce,” she said.
Another symposium is planned for early winter that will further examine how to teach in a trauma-informed way in the classroom.
Sasha Glim is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing Minor at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.