Content Warnings and Accommodations: How Much Trauma Do We Need to Read, Really?

This morning I have an email request–thoughtfully conveyed, and with poignant personal detail. Given the power imbalance and the nature of their requests for informal accommodations, our students often feel like they need to share painful experiences with us. I can hold space for that, but I wish they didn’t feel so pressured to disclose.

This is one of six similar requests I’ve had related to my two courses this term, and I should clarify that I invite and welcome class members to share their needs with me. I have a one-sentence philosophy of teaching: everyone gets what they need to learn and thrive. That’s it. I’ll do whatever it takes to figure out how to get there for all class members.

But the requests are, increasingly, about avoiding course readings and other materials: theatrical performances, music, films.

I worry.

Here’s my concern, in a nutshell: content warnings are intended to prepare readers for challenging and potentially re-traumatizing materials; they are not intended–as far as I understand–as a Stop sign.

My take on this may differ, though, personally and generationally, from my current students’ perspective. My sense is that they’re asking to be excused from deliberate re-exposure and potentially triggering material. And that’s not an unreasonable ask.

But some of the requests are very broad: no materials that allude to violence in any form, for instance, from a class member a few years ago; no references to racism, from another.

And I’m not sure how to teach in an effective manner and exclude from the syllabus or from a particular student’s reading experience all references to violence.

This is where, I think, the right-wings cons start shrieking “snowflake! snowflake!”

So let’s think about snowflakes for a moment, shall we?

Unpack that metaphor.

Every snowflake is unique.

Like our students, every snowflake exists in a particular environment where it thrives and survives . . . or melts. (Okay, my students don’t actually melt, but all of us who’ve been teaching for decades have witnessed some meltdowns, in class, during exams, at an office hour meeting, or . . . most frequently . . . during faculty meetings.)

So if every class member brings unique needs, can’t we accommodate that?

Tricky work, accommodate.

From the Latin meaning, effectively, “to make fit.”

So how do we make our learning environments enabling and fitting for provocative, engaging, deep learning for all class members? While also being mindful that each is a unique entity, a once-in-a-universe phenomenon.

(I do think we’d treat each other better–faculty meetings come to mind, again–if we remembered that we are all star stuff and here for a unique, blazing moment, to teach and learn and contribute and share and then, extinguished, return from matter back to energy.)

And I’m going to extend the point about my students’ needs for a moment to crime fiction. What if every crime writer had to include a number of content warnings for each book? In a sense, sub-genre classification functions as a content market/warning, but for readers new to a particular genre–the forensic anthropologist obsessed with serial killers, say–the sheer amount of gratuitous violence and body horror can be overwhelming.

Here’s my coping strategy: the 1995 season of the trial for the man who murdered Leslie Mahaffy, Kristen French, and his own sister-in-law, Tammy Homolka, I stopped reading the news and turned, instead, to Patricia Cornwell’s gruesome books. Several had been published by then and she was so popular that her books were being sold as inexpensive paperbacks at my local grocery story. I packed them into a bag with my frozen pasta dinners, cheap and filling and not especially nutritious or tasty.

Patricia Cornwell got me through the trial and conviction. Including the rage, as we realized, collectively, what his estranged wife had achieved by trading her testimony against him for a very light sentence. Somewhere out there, she is walking around, raising children. It’s appalling.

But not all readers, not all people, want to deal with horror by immersing themselves in a parallel fictional universe of horror.

Some of my students are asking me, in a world where war rages and children are bombed to smithereens, for a safe class space where we don’t talk about or read about violence.

And I’m not sure if this is feasible, pedagogically sound, or of interest to me, personally, given my research focus.

But I hope that all class members find the learning spaces that they need, in order to thrive. And I’m very sorry that sometimes my class is not that space for everyone, because I would like it to be.