Rethinking Teaching: Trigger Warnings (Part II)

Trigger warnings are warnings (alerts) given by faculty to students. They indicate that potentially disturbing material will be addressed in future lessons. They are easy to implement and don't take a great deal of time, but serve to create a higher level of transparency in teaching. In my last blog I argued that a standard critique of trigger warnings -- that they are, in effect, caving in to too-sensitive "snowflakes" -- missed the pedagogical mark and was, in fact, more a form of politics disconnected to teaching practices than anything else.

At this point, someone might say "Ok, sure, I can give a trigger warning. But, aren't they about so much more than that? Aren't they about letting students opt out of difficult subjects or about policing language or about alternative assignments?" This is a good question because it alerts us to the fact that there are implications to designing courses. Said differently, there are considerations that we need to build into what and how we teach. I will argue that it is easier to build these considerations in on the front end of course development than to try to gerry-rig something on the back end. 

Let me be clear about my point: I see nothing wrong with the range of instructional practices that follow from trigger warnings. Why? Because without them, the trigger warnings run the risk of becoming meaningless. They become simply words that one says. From a teaching perspective, this is the equivalent of saying something like "here is a problem and I want to alert you to it, but I will not do anything about it other than tell you that there is a problem." Let me be clear: I don't think warnings are meaningless. I think that they do help students get ready for difficult material. (Or, even for material that is not difficult. I often let students know in advance what they will be addressing in future lessons.) But, I also think we should take the next step and pro-actively consider the practices that can give meaning to trigger warnings.  

If you disagree with me (which is fair enough) let me begin with a question: what is wrong with this range of teaching practices (alternative assignments, changes in language use, etc.) associated with trigger warnings? When I talk to people who don't like them, they paint their adoption in stark terms. They suggest that there is something horribly wrong with a student missing a class or completing an alternative assignment or with some modifications to the language we use and within which we teach. I think we need to ask: is there something horribly wrong with this? What bad actually happens if students have, say, alternative assignments? Or, with faculty providing information on resources for students who need counselling? Or, with modifying our language? What bad actually happens in terms of teaching and learning? 

"What are you going to do next?" someone might now say "let students design the course?" 

Well ... no. I'll leave off student involvement in course design for another day because I think that  can be a good pedagogical tool, but let's take alternative assignments as an example that can illustrate the broader trends. The point of alternative assignments is not to let students do whatever they want but, in fact, precisely the opposite. The instructor is still designing the assignment. It is just that students are given a range of different assignments that allow them slightly different pathways through course material. I think most instructors run into problems with this because the request for alternative assignments seems to "pop up" and so they are caught off guard in the middle of a course. 

But we shouldn't be and this is an important point. The fact that there are deeply disturbing and traumatizing elements to, say, teaching about residential schools should not shock anyone who is actually teaching about them. If you are teaching about Indigenous issues are not aware of, say, intergenerational trauma, you need to pause and reconstruct your course materials. If you are teaching novels with graphic descriptions of violence or racism or works that might, say, present LGBTQi+ as "perverts," you should be aware, from the beginning of your course, that there will be students who find this material troubling and disturbing and that it will affect students differently depending on their lived experiences. Instead of asking "why should I have to design alternative assignments?" the more pressing question should be "why did I not think of this before I began teaching this subject?" 

This is a mea culpa. I'm not looking to fault anyone here but I am looking to provide what strikes me as sound teaching advise: begin from the beginning. If you are teaching in subject areas that you know involve difficult and disturbing materials, build that consideration into your course design. This allows the instructor to retain control over assignment design (if this is a matter of concern to you) while simultaneously building a more inclusive pedagogy that addresses the diversity of our student bodies. Said differently, alternative assignments are ways of meeting students where they are, of teaching them difficult subjects, and working with them in a way that builds a strong pedagogical relationship that is, after all, what we are all about? 

I won't belabour my the other points (although I might return to them in future blogs) because you can see where I am going. My interest lies in pedagogies that promote learning and judged in that way, I think we can accept and design alternative assignments, encourage guidelines on the use of language, include information on counselling, provide alternative resources to address a subject matter, and a range of other practices that give substance to the trigger warning. 

Here are a few practical steps we can take.

• Provide students with diverse trigger warnings. Particularly now, as we make use of different "delivery" modes for teaching, we are becoming more attuned to the fact that using a range of media can help teaching. Trigger warnings can be included on a syllabus, a web page, a recorded lecture, a voiced-over powerpoints. This provides multiple access points for students to the warning. 
• With your course materials provide a list or resources (in effect contact information) for students who may have trouble with material. Don't try to solve problems of trauma yourself. Direct students to the resources on you campus or in your community. 
• You likely should, btw, check into these resources in advance yourself. Give a quick call to your universities counselling services to ask what resources they provide. 
• Provide a mechanism for students to raise their concerns with you. It could be a meeting, a virtual interchange, or e-mail but provide some dedicated space for students to indicate their potential problems.
• If your course addresses disturbing subject or language, address that as a pedagogical matter early in the course (perhaps even, say, second or third day). You can do this in the abstract. For instance, I ask students to think about how they feel about having me, a white Settler Canadian, teach about Indigenous issues: do they see any potential pitfalls?  Would they recommend any particular strategies to address those?
• Build in diverse voices where you can. Guest speakers, videos, artwork, discussions, poetry, painting, and the like all provide mechanisms through which students can gain by listening to different voices. 
• Build alternative assignments in advance. Just as an example, a student who cannot write a short paper on residential schools might be asked to read look at other issues (say, compensation, land use, environmental protection, artwork). They key is that this is ready to go. 

One of the interesting things about this level of pedagogy is that I find it often helps me think more clearly about what it is that I want students to learn and why. And, no good assignment need go unused. If there is no need for an alternative assignment, you can use it in the course the next time you teach. 

What if a student indicates to you that they need to miss a class or not address a subject? This is trickier because your plan for a course might rest on a certain progression through material. I do understand that and I have never actually encountered this situation or, if I have, the students involved did not feel comfortable enough to discuss the matter with me (which is completely fair) and simply absented themselves from the class. 

My recommendation, then, comes from a place of theory as opposed to practice and someone might correct me.  If a student indicate this to you, I'd suggest that you acknowledge the legitimacy of their concerns and indicate that you respect them. I'd suggest as well, that you explain the importance of the unit, or lecture, or text within the framework of the course without going into details.  IOW, give the students the most information that you can about course development. Then, with the student, suggest a different approach to the material or other material. For example, one might exempt a student from, say, reading a certain poem but a different poem (perhaps with a written response) would be useful. A student might miss a lecture but you might be able to point them to a video or a on-line source. 

Both of these approaches require that as instructors we think about our goals: what is it that I am trying to accomplish with this lecture, the reading of this poem, this assignment, etc.? If we make that the first step, I am convinced that adaptions are possible, ethical, and do not disrupt teaching. 

Tenure Blues ... The Merits of Lecturing

In my last blog post, I tried to explain that lecturing is the font of much misunderstanding. Sure, some of it is really boring, but the fact that someone is in front of a lecture hall for an hour or an hour and a half does not mean that that is all there is to putting together a lecture. Moreover, I tried to argue that today's lectures are really quite different than the lectures many of us received when we were undergraduates a generation ago. They are complicated educational engagement that take a great deal of time to put together. There is no "teacher's text" book, out of which we crib notes (at least in the humanities and social sciences). My comments were in response to a comment made by Richard Gwyn to the effect that watching a video is more useful than lecturing.

Let us allow that I am right (not a big leap of faith for me but perhaps one you don't want to make so ... bear with me). Let's allow that the point I made in the previous blog are, more or less, accurate:

• Lectures are conceptualized as one part of an educational process that includes a range of media, discussion, student input, etc.
• That good lectures are time consuming to put together 
• That faculty would likely lecture even less if more resources were available to have smaller classes

I don't see these as radical perspectives, but you can check them out for yourself if you doubt me.  This said, these points do not exhaust what should be said about lectures. I have a number of other points to make, which I will try to keep briefer than my previous blogs relating to lecturing. These other points, I hope, go to the heart of any discussion of lecturing. 

1. Is everyone a good lecturer? Clearly, no. Some of my colleagues (as I said in my previous blog) seem superlative. Others are not. Much of that can be chocked up to personality, as opposed to preparation. Some people are just livelier in front of a room than others. Some subjects admit of a more lively presentation than others, as well. This goes, I will take it for granted, for any particular job. I am certain that there are more entertaining lecturers than I. But, that misses the point: should everything we do in the classroom be entertaining? Should the liveliest lecturer be considered the best?  Should we even compare education to watching videos? I watch videos periodically. I like youtube and watch Jon Stewart "best of" clips. Should we compare that ... to education? Would Stewart compare that to education? 

I think one of the problems with talking about the value of lecturing and comparing it to videos (even instructional videos) is that we run the risk of a false comparison. Sometimes, learning things is less than exciting. There, I said it. Some of my less lively lectures to my intro class involve matters that are remarkably important, say constitutionally guaranteed rights. This is tricky legalistic stuff. To understand it as something more than a sound bit ("I support the Charter!") can require care and deliberation. There are lectures that I give on other subject that are, frankly, far more entertaining or even far more user friendly, but this subject deserves a serious treatment in a way that allows student to fully engage the subject. It moves slow and, in my view, rightly so. There issue of whether or not someone is a good lecturer or not might be more complicated. I don't stack up well compared to a video (it can have high production values, a team of researchers, great camera work, interviews -- tracked down by the team of researchers or agreed to by public figures because of potential audience size -- and other "hooks."). But, is that the test of a good lecture? Moreover, as I said in my last blog, the specific lecture in question is, for the faculty member, never the last word on the subject. We design assignments for students to articulate their own views, have follow up or preliminary readings, discussion groups, etc. I am not at all convinced that we should castigate supposedly boring lectures simply because they appear to be boring because education is just not as much fun as comedy. But that is not the test. If it were ... well ... we would turn out post-secondary education systems over to Dane Cook. And, lest my point be lost, the lecture itself is just one part of an engagement with a subject and so comparing my lecture on the Charter to Cook's "atheist sneeze" (if you have not seen it, it is really funny, look it up) is comparing apples and oranges and we are sending the wrong message. Sometimes learning takes time and energy and is less exciting than the things we do for our past times. Does that make it not worthwhile?

2. Why lecture? If there are other options available ... why give lectures? First, because other options are not always available, at least in the form of videos. We would want our post-secondary educational system bound, as it were, to youtube? Videos, to be sure, can be very helpful as part of an overall educational programme. No one is shooting them down or saying "don't use them." But, if one were to just use videos ... would that not make educational a prisoner to what videos existed? What if the video that does exist is out of date? Or, what if is it is wrong? I actually liked the old The Valour and the Horror videos about World War II, but are they all there is about World War II?

I lecture for a number of reasons but one of the reasons that I do lecture is that I can convey information effectively. Among the things that I tell my students is this: you can get the information I obtained to give this lecture; you can read the books I have read. Over the years, I've read ... dozens of books on the Charter and rights, court cases, scholarly articles, public opinion polls, newspaper articles, watched dozens and dozens of interviews ... in addition to the constitution. And my students could replicate this work; there is no doubt about it. But, why should they? If they find the subject important, they can and should research it themselves and, perhaps, write a paper on it. They can and should build up their own expertise and I say this as well. But, for the students who are really being introduced to the subject for what is really the first time ... I can save them a lot of time. I can synthesize all the different sources of information for them, explain the history, draw in comparative perspectives, indicate areas where lawyers or scholars or politicians disagree; flag the key arguments, clear away myths, etc. In other words, my lecture can save them a lot of time. That being the case ... why not make use of it?

What is more, I can use the lecture to set our discussion of the Charter in a broader framework. I can refer back to subject we have already discussed (say, national identity) and forward to subjects we will address (say, diversity issues). In addition to saving the students a bunch of time, I can also contextual information for them and show who it is connected to other aspects of Canada. A lecture, in other words, as one part of a multifaceted educational engagement can be a very effective way to bring students up to speed on important issues relating to their subject matter, while providing background information, facts, and context.

3. A lecture can do something else as well. It can provide students with a model of argumentation that they themselves can use to (a) develop their own ideas or (b) contest the ideas that I am setting before them. In other words, one can use a lecture to show students what a good argument entails. Lectures convey information but, as anyone who has attended a lecture recently knows, they do more than that. They engage important issues and suggest ways of addressing problems. For instance, imagine we were talking about the "democratic deficit." My lecture might provide important information for students -- trajectories of voting, party memberships, key attitudes toward democracy on the part of Canada, the institutional matrix that supposedly realizes democracy in Canada, etc. -- but I will try to include a specific argument in that information. My argument might address this question: why are Canadians opting out of voting? In mobilizing history, polling data, discussions of institutions, etc., I strive to answer that question. Ultimately, I might be wrong but what I am trying to show students is how one puts together a good argument that addressing this issue. In Canadian Studies we, then, take this a step further (not everyone does; it depends on  the discipline). We ask: what can be done. By showing the constituents of a good argument and the moving to another forum (say, class discussion or brainstorming) we can start to apply the same model of good argument to discard weak argument, understand complexity, and -- ideally -- the students will arrive at both a better understanding (something more than, say, youth don't vote) and a potentially better solution.

4. Do students like lectures? The assumption behind Gwyn's comments is that they really don't. But is that the case? I can understand why some people don't like lectures. They are not for everyone. Different people do learn in different ways (some people learn very well independently and like correspondence courses because of that. I don't. It is just a matter of personality and skills). My general sense is that as students go along in their education, they like lectures less and less and rightly so. Having mastered the background information (or, know how to get the background information), they are now looking for ways to articulate their own views (this is why we move from lecture/discussion to seminar courses).

But, not all students dislike lectures. A number of years ago, I raised the idea of video-taking my lectures for a class and then posting the videos on the web (this was one of the academic issues I periodically raise  with classes to get student views). What surprised me was the general rejection of the idea. There were a bunch of reasons students rejected this idea and it still would have been a lecture through a different medium. What surprised me was that students had a lot of good things to say about lectures. Some might have been patting me on the back to win brownie points but I doubt it, and if you knew our students, you would doubt it too. What they liked, they said, was the ability to get information in a concise way and that a video did not "do it" for them the way a live person did. They also said that they liked the ability to stop a lecture by asking a question for clarification or interrupting the lecture before it got going to ask for further information on something I had said in a previous lecture. A live human being and interaction, in other words, were, for them, important components of a lecture.

Each year I lecture to a large intro class. This class has students in it who will major or minor in Canadian Studies but it also has students in it to take electives or distribution credits. When I ask them about lecturing, I get an interesting response. Since this is not their major or minor, they tell me, they are quite content to let me do the work (that is, lecture). They learn from it (or, don't, as they want). But, they tell me, they have more than enough work to do in their other classes and are looking for a way to approach a subject that interests them (which is why they take my course as opposed to someone else's), but in a way that allows them to keep their focus on their major. Lectures, they tell me, do this form them more than, say, a discussion-based format.

This jives with my own experience in discussion-based educational fora. In my intro course, as I've noted, we have both a lecture and a discussion component. As instructors, we are frequently told that students want to articulate their own views. I can understand that. It also important for education and self development. But, what I have also noticed is that not all students want to articulate their own views on all subjects. In other words, when provided with a discussion format, some students opt-in and participate; others opt-out and sit their quietly.

Let me summarize. No one is arguing that lectures are the be-all-and-end-all of education. They are part of a multifaceted approach to learning geared to adults that extends over a number of different courses and over a number of years. Lectures are one part of that process. To argue otherwise is to demonstrate a lack of knowledge of that process. There are good reasons for including lectures in that process. They concisely convey important information, model argumentation for students, and are appreciated -- indeed liked and favoured -- by some students. Education is not a "one size fits all." What is more, to easily reject lectures, or compare them to videos, is to make a false comparison. Sure, a lecture is not as entertaining as a video but is this the message we want to send our students: do it only if it entertains you?