Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence

To generate opportunities for transformative learning, educators must create learning environments that help students feel safe and encourage them to grapple with potentially difficult material. The trigger warning, a brief statement information students of potential distressing or re-traumatizing content, has been offered as a way to do just that, but this practice is neither as effective nor as equitable as it may seem. Intentionally or indirectly, the trigger warning limits the extent to which students are encouraged to engage in transformative critical conversations and reinforces the culture of silence that prevails in many educational spaces. Emerging as a response to trauma amid an educational environment that professes student-responsiveness and celebrates diversity yet perpetuates the marginalization of many of the bodies in the classroom, the trigger warning is not the problem – but it is not the solution either. What does this mean for the faculty members teaching this new generation of college students? And the teachers who find this generation’s younger siblings in their high school classrooms? Drawing upon original research, Mara Lee Grayson tracks the rise of the trigger warning within historical and contemporary educational contexts; explores its potentialities, limitations, and abuses as praxis; and offers curricular suggestions for high school and college instructors seeking to implement equitable, antiracist pedagogies that simultaneously encourage students’ well-being, provoke intellectual and emotional growth, and challenge the cultures of silence that maintain inequity on school campuses.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Trigger Warning as Apologia Chapter 1: Racism, Antiracism, and Education: Classroom Spaces as Microcosms Chapter 2: The Rise of the Trigger Warning Chapter 3: Speaking Truth to Trauma: Schooling and Suffering in the United States Chapter 4: Academic Discourse and the Inequity of the Politeness Protocol Chapter 5:Coping in the Classroom: Emotions and Education Chapter 6: Reading Lives, Writing Lives: Languaging and Counternarrating Trauma Chapter 7: Career Considerations: Managing Challenges to Emotional Health and Academic Freedom Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :
Mara Lee Grayson is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Her first book, Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2018.

Review :
How can educators honor the cultural, linguistic, and social history of their students and also challenge them to reflect and consider the experiences of others knowing that some topics may evoke painful memories or imaginations? Teaching in culturally diverse classrooms, being sensitive to the unsettling nature of the homophobic, white male supremacy narrative in the United States, some educators use trigger statements in hopes of avoiding emotional or psychological trauma during class discussion. We welcome Dr. Mara Lee Grayson’s book that exposes and composes, explains, explores and expands our thinking about social, political, racial, cultural and gender issues that influence what and how we teach. Avowing that valuable learning occurs in conversations that disrupt and disturb one’s thinking, Dr. Grayson urges us to weigh the cost, then persist and design lessons that cultivate thoughtful, nurturing learning communities and explore equitable curricula with the students in our classrooms. Grayson offers a vital resource for college and secondary English and writing teachers who wish to deepen their social justice practices and discussions in the classroom with students. Her careful nuancing of trigger warnings, how one might use them in the classroom, and the problems with using them are nicely explained. The book also details pedagogical ways to work with trauma among students in classes that likely may inadvertently add to that trauma, or trigger it. Those discussions nicely weave important related topics about white fragility, academic freedom, and antiracist pedagogies, all of which make for a more conscientious thinking about how to be a socially just teacher. Furthermore, Grayson contextualizes her own white, female subjectivity, as well as her own past trauma, into the discussion in ways that many teachers might learn from. Mara Lee Grayson is one of an emerging generation of composition and rhetoric scholars who are not only writing at the leading edge of research in our field, but whose activism is transforming our profession. If this generation is standing on the shoulders of giants to see what may be seen from there, they are also calling us to account for that which too many of us have refused to see. Fiercely and tenderly, in turns, this new generation is leading scholars, teachers, and students in the field to an understanding of equity richly conceived and insisting that we make it and keep it real. In Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence Mara Lee Grayson has accomplished the remarkable feat of producing a book in the field of composition studies that is exceptionally well researched, well theorized – and supremely readable. While Grayson has written most directly to teachers, this is a book for students – undergraduate and graduate – as well as for “seasoned” teachers who might be inclined to believe they no longer need such books. They do. We do. Race Talk fills a space in the literature of composition studies that has been empty for too long. In prose that is both elegant and accessible, Grayson argues for equitable, trauma-informed pedagogical practice built upon the framework of racial literacy. Drawing on feminist and intersectional theory, critical race theory, whiteness studies, and trauma studies as well as critical discourse analysis and her own empirical study of composition teachers, Grayson offers readers a thorough historical context, clearly defined terms, and astute critique of direct and oblique manifestations of racism and white supremacy that manifest in those everyday teaching practices that too often function as “common sense” in the writing classroom. In particular, Grayson notes the ways and degrees to which the “trigger warning” often serves the interests of more privileged students while doubling down on the silencing and marginalization of Students of Colour and Indigenous Students. Further, she argues, debates about the efficacy of “trigger warnings” frame students from historically marginalized and excluded groups who have been traumatized by racism, white supremacy, and their most common manifestation in quotidian microaggressions as members of a “victim culture.” But Grayson accomplishes more in this text than telling us what we ought not do. Using the very pedagogical strategies for which she advocates, Grayson shuttles between narrative, analysis, critique, and counternarrative to weave a racially literate, critical pedagogical praxis. Theoretically grounded and eminently pragmatic, Grayson offers her readers a way to move that we can learn, use, and build upon as we work to create and sustain equitable writing classrooms. I am delighted to endorse and recommend this book and am looking forward to including it as required reading for both undergraduate and graduate courses I will soon be teaching.