Should we use content warnings?
They're all my colleagues have talked about this week.
Sometimes, it feels like high school students want content warnings for everything.
I start here because, as a teacher who believes that content warnings are important in the classrooms of the 2020s, I want to begin writing about them by naming that they can be – I’d even say often are – exhausting for teachers. Content warnings in classrooms are a new, responsive, sometimes exhausting approach to a part of life that has a deep, long tradition. In order to produce benefit to a degree aligned with the demand that they tax, those who use content warnings need to understand how they fit into broader ecosystems of care and learning.
This past Tuesday, three of my colleagues led a workshop on content warnings in the classroom for our Upper School (grades 8-12) faculty. One of the first activities in the workshop was what they called a “temperature check”: an anonymous survey that asked teachers whether they used content warnings in their classrooms and whether they thought that content warnings were (this is a short version of the list):
Important for student mental health and wellbeing
Oversimplifications
“Bubble wrap” or coddling for students
Helpful resources for students
and so on. I loved that they took this survey and projected the results, because, exactly as I expected, many of my colleagues felt that content warnings were unnecessary, coddling, infantilizing, and oversimplified. I present this data to my readers because it’s important to always remember that teachers are not a monolith, and any teaching faculty holds a wide variety of distinct opinions about any given issue.
One of the colleagues who led the presentation was our Upper School Counselor, who holds a Psy.D and has worked with children and adolescents for decades. What she explained, and what I’ve always felt, is that fifteen or twenty years ago, content warnings would have seemed infantilizing and unnecessary for high school students. Tht’s because students now are not the students who we’ve taught before – just as students in 2000 were different from students in 1980. A content warning exists to prepare students for the types of “triggering” concepts or ideas that cause their physical systems to respond in panic, anxiety attacks, mental shutdown, or other fight or flight responses.
When psychologists talk about a person being triggered, they’re not talking about a person having a difference of opinion or an intellectual sensitivity. They’re talking about a physiological response. Students in 2022, particularly the high school students with whom I and my colleagues work, are showing alarming rates of suicidality and depresssion, but content warnings aren’t just for those kids. Especially after the pandemic, even most students who do not suffer from mental illness or distress lack core coping mechanisms to respond to stimuli that cause disarray in their bodies. That disarray is much more common than it used to be, and we shouldn’t be surprised that it is.
This I can say undeniably: an overwhelming majority of the students who I teach lack coping skills, and they aren’t learning them in other environments. One tenet that I’ve learned in teaching and reading research in education is this: the best way to teach students new skills is not to expect those skills to suddenly appear. Every once in a while, you can throw a child into the water and they learn how to swim. Most of time, though, the kid starts to drown. That’s why teachers exist, and it’s also why teaching isn’t easy.
Here’s the key point though: a content warning alone, whether delivered orally or written into a syllabus, does basically nothing to teach students the coping skills that they need. It only acknowledges the need – the lack of coping skills – without seeming to work toward meeting that need. In my mind, content warnings are oversimplified, and this is why they need to be part of a broader system within any classroom or environment in which they’re deployed. A content warning is a recognition of discomfort, and it creates an opening through which teacher and students can access one another to move to a deeper understanding of complicated material. Without that context, content warnings can start to look a lot like what critics say they are.
In other words, content warnings don’t prevent students from entering into complex subjects, as many people – some of my colleagues included – think. Rather, content warnings enable kids to enter into complex subjects, by naming students’ needs and working from where they are, rather than where adults wish they would be.
So, how do I make them work?
In our workshop, one of my colleagues guided us through a process for integrating content guides into our classes, which meaningfully built on my thinking about and approach to content warnings. Most schools have neurodiverse populations, which means that they bring together students with different mental strengths and weaknesses, processing speeds and styles, and working memories. As a result, as my colleague told us, it’s useful for students to have both written and verbal communication around content warnings, both distributed during class and posted in online learning platforms. Those communications can and should be both detailed and opt-in; this guide can help teachers or anyone else hoping to implement content warnings into communities and institutions develop their language around them.
What I’m more interested in – because actually writing and saying these things is not, as it turns out, particularly difficult – is how to contextualize and build from content warnings. First, it matters that teachers, as they introduce a content warning in class, build that introduction around their preexisting relationships with students. The knowledge and belief that kids can handle difficult material shouldn’t be a secret or an assumption; teachers can and should address student anxieties while asserting their own confidence that those students can handle difficult content and conversations about that difficult content. That action invites students to deeper conversations while also creating an opportunity for students who really struggle with content to know that their teacher is prepared for that difficult and believes that that difficulty is reasonable, natural, and/or not a problem but an area for growth. Constructive conversations, both between students and between individual students with their teacher, often ensue. The trust that builds from the moment that the teacher says “I see you” can be a touchpoint to which teachers can refer when they’re guiding students into discussions that they know will make their students uncomfortable.
Most teachers who teach now aren’t used to content warnings. Only the newest teachers to the classroom don’t see them as burdensome additions to their workloads. And certainly, it takes a significant amount of work to anticipate student difficulty, follow up with students who cannot cope well with course materials, discuss sensitive subjects deeply but sensitively, and even redesign assessments in a way that respects student needs while challenging them to learn out of those needs. It’s a mistake, though, to look – as many educators do – at content warnings as additive. They’re just a different way of looking at the kind of responsive, skills-centric, community-based work that education has considered best practice for decades.
It’s a problem that teachers have to be the people who teach students the coping skills that they lack. Since teachers don’t have training as therapists, they shouldn’t be treated as therapists or expected to serve as therapists. But we, as a culture, aren’t going to get rid of the fact that teenagers lack these skills by wishing them away. Certainly, it behooves adults to think broadly and with great care at the bigger picture of triggering content and the general overall emotionalism and passion that is often a problem within our culture right now. Myopically focusing on students, especially adolescents, and criticizing their desire for content warnings is exactly the wrong way to solve these complicated problems. Rather, teaching students how to cope with the experiences and content that trigger them than can have a transformative effect: by acknowledging this deficit, we can make educational spaces actually teach kids how to respond to the things that trigger them before they become adults participating in public discourse. This isn’t bubble wrap. It’s a way to help kids who need our help to become the adults we hope they will, and they want to, be.
What’s the shelf life of a high school education, anyway? Teachers hear their friends, political leaders, and neighbors talk all the time about what a waste of time their high school years seemed. The content, and even many of the academic skills, don’t last. If anything, an investment in content warnings as part of a broader ecosystem of care and challenge is a commitment to skills that we can’t live without.