I’m a university lecturer and wokeism is stifling free debate in my classroom

In the classroom, I must be careful. The room is mined with topics that can explode without warning. Therein lie the “trigger words”.

I teach creative writing and journalism. In my classes, “faggot” (as in a bundle of sticks) and “racism” are both words that have triggered past students, irrespective of the broader context in which they are raised. The result was a palpable and general sense of discomfort and uncertainty in the classroom, blushed faces and furtive looks, which I felt ill-equipped to manage.

Concerns about trigger words and phrases can stifle discussion in universities.Credit: Istock

Trigger words or phrases are words that can elicit a strong emotional response from individuals who have experienced trauma or have been subjected to discrimination or marginalisation. They can cause significant distress or anxiety, which can interfere with a person’s ability to learn or communicate. In a classroom setting, the use of trigger words can create a hostile learning environment and can have a negative impact on students’ mental health and wellbeing.

I’ve seen my students cry and tremble with anxiety. I’ve seen them bolt from the classroom and refuse to join the discussion without citing a reason. In online classes, they’ve posted comments in the chat bar, all in caps, saying, TRIGGER WARNING! The technology makes it easier for them to disengage. They log off.

The real and present concerns of mental wellbeing notwithstanding, I have noticed some of my students appear to conflate trigger words with generic feelings of discomfort or anxiety which reasonably orbit certain topics. They smile knowingly, roll their eyes or turn away, implicitly raising the question of whether it’s “appropriate” (an Orwellian term) for us to follow this path of inquiry. Conversations can start slowly, tentatively, laden with preamble and equivocation, “I don’t believe this myself but…”

This classroom dynamic will be familiar to many of us navigating so-called “woke” culture in classrooms. The term “woke” is a concept that symbolises awareness of social issues and movements against injustice, inequality and prejudice. And in a classroom, the dynamic between woke sensitivity and open dialogue can be especially complex.

Humanities subjects necessarily intersect with sensitive topics, such as race, gender, sexuality, religion and politics. In the classes I teach, these topics are part of the subject matter. The challenge is how to navigate this terrain with acknowledgment of both our students’ emotional needs and the intellectual demands of university-level study.

My concern as an educator is the risk that perceived wokeism in a classroom can dissuade teachers and students from exploring difficult and sensitive topics for fear of personal or professional reprisal. The casualisation of teachers may compound this risk, where renewal of short-term contracts may be subject to the results of a teacher’s student satisfaction survey. Who dares rock the boat?

The irony is that woke ideology, which is about inclusion, risks becoming a means of exclusion through self-censorship. I’ve had students tell me privately they want to write about topics such as racism or gender or disability, but don’t because they worry the issues are too volatile; they don’t want to upset anyone, least of all their classmates.

Teachers and students need to trust in each other’s beneficent intentions.

Social development studies academic Crystena A. H. Parker-Shandal’s work on contemplative pedagogy offers a framework for approaching cultural sensitivity in the classroom. She writes about restorative justice, specifically the practice of peace circles, which bring people together to engender understanding. In a restorative justice context, such an assembly typically involves the harmed, the harmers and the broader community they share.

Parker-Shandal advocates collectively reimagining class dynamics to harness sensitivity and personal experience as a useful dimension of learning and teaching.

I tried such a recalibration in my creative nonfiction class last week. I asked the students if they were prepared to trust each other this semester, to believe that another person’s doubts and questions came not from spite but from noble impulses, such as curiosity, a desire to understand, to connect.

I invited my students to commit wholeheartedly to inquiry, to promise to ask each other questions, no matter what their reservations, in the interest of open dialogue. If not here, then where? The students seemed enthusiastic about this pact, a few told me later they felt emboldened by it, others said they felt relieved. I’m hopeful.

“Wokeism” is affecting open and challenging dialogue.Credit: Istock

As Parker-Shandal writes: “When taken up constructively, safely – and inclusively – conflict brings people together.”

For students and educators, embracing the idea that managed conflict can have a constructive outcome may be the first step in helping to disarm the interpretation that strong feelings act as stop signs to conversation.

I propose that a democratic classroom manifests French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of the operative versus inoperative community, where a broken community is one which functions without conflict, for it has ceased to accommodate nuance, difference and dissent. A functioning community, Nancy suggests, only appears inoperative because it is buffeted and shaped by dissent, a messy but vital process of perennial negotiation. Without conflict, we stagnate.

Wrapping words in barbed wire gives them more power than they deserve and limits access to the educational terrain. As much as I love words, they are approximations of our thoughts and feelings. We owe it to ourselves to interrogate and expand their meanings through dialogue, even if doing so is uncomfortable.

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