Be Intentional? Yes, Please!

Fans of the Song of Ice and Fire book series and/or HBO’s Game of Thrones will know that that various Houses have “words.” For House Stark, “Winter is Coming.” If my family’s House had our own words, they might be “We Do What We Say We Do.” We consistently communicate our future plans and follow through with them. Along those same lines, we don’t make promises/projections that we aren’t sure we can keep.

So, when I recently read Colleen Flaherty’s piece about a recent symposium about the faculty models used in higher education, the main thrust of the symposium’s outputs resonated with me. According to Flaherty, the big takeaway from the symposium was that the purpose and role of higher education in the 21st century needs to be better defined and institutions’ missions clarified in order to drive the best faculty model to support those purposes/missions. In other words–choose the faculty model that best helps you “do what you say you do” as an institution.

This is something I believe my own institution has done well. We have a mission to ensure students can access the higher education they need to reach their professional goals and be productive members of their respective organizations. Since students need knowledge and skills relevant to their professional goals and organizations, the faculty are practitioner faculty. The large bulk of our faculty members are current practitioners in their respective fields who share their knowledge, skill, and expertise from their day jobs with students in our classes. Students gain up-to-the-minute examples of the ways that course concepts and research-based theories are applied in real-world settings. I regularly have students tell me that they gain something from class today that they use in their jobs tomorrow. For a school whose mission is to connect so closely to the profession, I don’t see how it gets any better than that.

What strikes me, though, is how other institutions aren’t being so intentional about their selection of faculty. Articles abound describing the lot of adjunct faculty members who are piecing together an existence in academia by teaching a few classes at several different institutions because full-time (let alone tenure track) positions are not the norm. If the main takeaway from this symposium about faculty models was “we’re not ready to select a faculty model,” what does that say about the way institutions are doing it now? For me, it says they are in a constant “stop-gap” mode, just being sure that classes are covered by someone, but without attention to either getting the best person for that role, or ensuring there is a corps of faculty-employees who can devote sufficient time and attention to their teaching jobs.

Create Your Own Bubble

The “Baby On Board,” “helicopter parented” Millennial Generation strikes again, according to a recent article. In it, Medina describes a growing trend on traditional college campuses, in which students are calling for “trigger warnings” in course syllabi. These warnings are similar to the ratings/sub-ratings on movies and video games, or spoiler alerts in articles about TV/movies, in which viewers/readers are warned about the types of objectionable material that led to the assigned rating (e.g. the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone PG rating was for “scary moments and mild language”). In syllabus trigger warnings, the professor would alert students to any potentially troubling or objectionable content that may be found in the literature, film, or other required course material.

A trigger warning in the course syllabus would, at minimum, give students the heads up to be prepared for what they may find in their course readings. Alternately, some students may use such warnings to refuse to take part in course content altogether, ostensibly to avoid a perceived trauma or memory or emotion they’d rather avoid. I’m led to wonder, though, if students are better off for avoiding content. What opportunities for learning and growth are missed when students refuse to participate? Would instructors be right to grade accordingly, considering that students typically base their non-participation on an attempt to avoid troubling emotional reactions based on difficult life experiences?

Students can effectively create their own individualized bubbles to protect from any material they might find challenging or troubling or otherwise objectionable.

I find this trend similar to two other phenomena we observe in society today:

1) Media everywhere seems to have a spoiler alert or content rating

2) So many people are only reading or viewing media that support their own views/experience

It’s been a long time since I’ve consumed media in which I didn’t find one or more spoiler alerts. Newspapers, magazines, news programs, talk shows, and podcasts all let me know if there is even the slightest chance that a plot point may be revealed about a media production. I even see this for descriptions of productions that were released years ago, in case there are consumers who haven’t yet watched a movie or TV series and plan to watch it for the first time on their favorite streaming service. Consumers are protected in their very own spoiler zone bubble from learning anything they might rather avoid about media they may or may not be planning to consume.

Likewise, every movie, TV show, and video game has some type of content rating, with sub-ratings to let me know not just who the media was designed for, but why a given rating was assigned. Consumers can be highly selective about their media, based on these ratings and sub-ratings, and ostensibly avoid any type of material they might find objectionable. On top of that, a really serious consumer can refer to websites and blogs in which similarly-minded individuals provide further recommendations about media, just in case the content ratings alone are not sufficient to determine if one should be watching a given show or movie.

The rise of partisan news media provides further bubbles, even echo chambers, by which consumers only have to experience viewpoints that match their own sensibilities. Conservative- and progressive-minded individuals can get their news from 24-hour news outlets, newspapers, magazines, and websites that cater to their points of view.

It’s not surprising that in a society where all these media consumer protections are available, students might seek similar alerts in their higher education experiences. But, as Medina points out, requests for trigger warnings face off against faculty members’ academic freedom to select the course materials and instructional methods they believe will best support students’ mastery of learning outcomes. Some faculty may find their academic freedom and instructional authority threatened by a demand for trigger warnings and refuse to add them. Even in the case where faculty members add trigger warnings, if they overlook something students may be empowered to take action with a claim of discrimination or harassment because their particular brand of objection was not considered while others were.

This trend raises a number of challenging questions for students and faculty members:

• How much pedagogical value would trigger warnings have for reducing students’ emotional reactions to challenging content, to allow for more effective analysis?
• What threats to mastery of learning outcomes might trigger warnings pose, if students use them to opt out of course materials?
• What threats to academic freedom do trigger warnings pose, particularly in cases where students push for university policies that require them?
• Would either the presence of, or lack of, trigger warnings create circumstances that open faculty members to charges of discrimination?

What are your thoughts? If you’re a faculty member, would you add trigger warnings about potentially challenging content? Why or why not?