Trigger Warnings : Teaching Through Trauma

Abstract

How do instructors navigate the tension between facilitating safe spaces for students while also challenging students intellectually in increasingly politicized classroom settings? How can trigger warnings be used to empower and/or support students and facilitate antiracist, queer, anticolonial, and other social justice-oriented pedagogies? Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma brings theory and praxis to examine the ideological underpinnings and pedagogy around trigger warnings and trauma, offering multiple heuristics for classroom implementation. The ongoing interest in trigger warnings is partly a result of trigger warnings and trauma becoming more inextricably interwoven in the past few years in the wake of COVID-19, mental health crises, right-wing attacks on educational institutions, climate change, and attempts at political redress and educational equity. Critiques of trigger warnings come from all sides of the political and pedagogical spectra, and even scholars and practitioners who offer a trauma-informed approach to the topic are not unified in their view of the benefits or drawbacks of trigger warnings. Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma provides insights through a range of forms: research articles, personal essays, long and short teaching narratives, student perspectives, memoirs, vignettes, autoethnographies, reflections, case studies, manifesto, theory, and history. Not only does this collection create a more varied engagement experience for readers, but, in line with recent scholarship in “counterstory,” it also allows for a wider variety of voices to be heard and for the articulation of experiences that might not be well accommodated by traditional scholarly essays.