Resources by Meredith Minister

I ask students to laugh at death with me. Rather than treating death as off-limits or something that must be approached with absolute solemnity, I ask students to laugh. And when I make jokes about death and they stare at me with horror, I remind them that it’s ok to laugh about death. I like to think that they eventually get used to me. Discussions about trauma often coalesce around healing, but this orientation forecloses the (im)possibilities inherent in trauma. Quick movements from trauma to healing also assume the inherent value of life as opposed to death. Rather than treating life and death as opposites, the death positivity movement suggests that death is a part of life and the ongoing ecosystem. Death becomes something active, something that can be done (and done well), instead of avoided until it overtakes the agency of a body (or mind) that is actively attempting to remain alive. The death positively movement maintains that individual human lives may not continue forever, but life does. I teach about this movement in my course “Religion Outside of Religions,” a course that draws on theories and methods often used to study religious traditions to explore aspects of contemporary U.S. culture that aren’t considered overtly religious. The death positivity movement, therefore, serves as an example of an orientation to the so-called natural world that occurs outside of overt religious traditions. Students explore the myths, rituals, beliefs, and ethical systems that guide this movement, especially as they develop in contrast to broader medical and funerary practices in the U.S. Through this process, students often confront their own assumptions about death, especially as these assumptions tend to be informed by the medical and funerary practices opposed by the death-positivity movement. These confrontations push students beyond life-death binaries and some even learn to laugh at my jokes (I keep wondering if I should start listing that as a learning outcome). Might we, as teachers, adopt this posture to trauma? What would it look like to push ourselves past the binary of trauma and healing? What if we accept and adapt to the trauma that is always already in our midst? What if we refuse to tidy up traumatized psyches behind the closed doors of licensed counselors, much like the corpses made to look eerily lifelike in funeral homes?   Teaching about different approaches to death can reorient the assumption that trauma is bad and healing good. This is a particularly important reorientation within a context where trauma is often ongoing and not a one-time event. The death positivity movement recognizes that some people live in closer proximity to death than others and that the deaths that result from this proximity can and should be avoided. As Everything Dies: A Coloring Book About Life! says, “I know everything dies, but there seems to me to be a big difference between something dying to feed another living thing, and this strange knack we have for needless death. These are deaths that don’t feed life. These are deaths of entire species and peoples and places. Humans seem to do this a lot.” (58) Recognizing that all deaths (like all lives) are not equal given our current political systems, the movement argues for breaking the culture of silence around death, including the culture of silence around systems that locate some bodies closer to death as a result of race, sexuality, gender, disability, class, or location. By opening these questions, the death positivity movement pushes us to teach recognizing that trauma is often ongoing and systemic, rather than a one-time event. The death positivity movement encourages us to ask why life is necessarily better than death. It also begs the question of whether trauma must end with healing, suggesting that trauma, like death, is ever-present and not something to be avoided but, rather, to be engaged. These are ideas to bring to students and to let challenge our own assumptions about teaching, particularly around the place of trauma in the classroom.

While there are moments in the classroom in which trauma prevents learning, to suggest that a traumatized student cannot learn turns the classroom into a space that privileges students who are protected from trauma as a result of being rich, white, male, and heterosexual. Accommodating traumatized students is not just an accessibility issue, it is also about teaching and learning in and about the material worlds in which we live. Rather than thinking about how to get ill or traumatized students out of our classrooms, we need to think about how to make our classrooms more accessible not only for students with visible disabilities but also for students with illnesses, including psychological illness. What are some of the concrete actions faculty can take in order to make classroom spaces more accessible to students with illness, including those with PTSD? First, faculty members should create learning environments that are accessible to ill and/or traumatized students by, first, establishing clear deadlines well in advance of an assignment due date and, second, being flexible about those deadlines. Flexible deadlines do not change the learning outcomes of the classroom but, rather, offer students the opportunity to complete required work. Ellen Boucher describes how she gives students an automatic two-day grace period on any paper. If a student cannot complete the work by the end of that grace period, they must meet with her in order to review the assignment. Policies such as Boucher’s make learning spaces more accessible not only for students experiencing illness and/or trauma but also for students who have to juggle other life commitments and don’t have the privilege of being only a student. Second, in order to make the classroom more accessible for ill or traumatized students, I recommend that professors use some kind of content or trigger warning for classroom material. For me, this is easily incorporated into the last few minutes of class in which I preview the next class and any upcoming assignments. This preview gives students an opportunity to prepare for upcoming content. Previewing content prior to the class in which it will actually be discussed also gives students an opportunity to approach me individually if they have particular concerns. Trigger and content warnings are not about excusing students but, rather, about helping students prepare to engage difficult content.    Finally, faculty members can make classroom spaces more accessible to traumatized students by holding space during intense or emotional discussions. Stephanie Crumpton describes this method in “Trigger Warnings, Covenants of Presence, and More: Cultivating safe space for theological discussions about sexual trauma.” In this article, Crumpton argues that a trauma-sensitive pedagogical strategy includes having grounding exercises prepared. She states, “It is important to have a process in place if the classroom tilts out of balance as stories are shared” (145). Gently walking students back from a text, clip, or argument reminding them of where they are, and holding the space through practices such as asking students to take a deep breath are practices that can help ground students in the moment. This grounding not only enables traumatized students to continue participating in the learning process but also helps other students to realize the gravity of the material. This is not an exhaustive list of possibilities but incorporating these practices will create a classroom that is both more engaged with material realities and more accessible to students experiencing illness and/or trauma. All of these suggestions, of course, require work on the part of faculty members. This work is, to be frank, often unpaid. Different faculty will have to parse this out depending on institutional contexts and personal needs, but different institutional contexts and/or personal needs are not an excuse to maintain inaccessible classrooms. Making classrooms accessible to the illness and/or trauma already present in the learning experiences of students offers a direct route to “engaged” teaching.

When I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, everything seemed to cave in on my body as questions narrowed: first, what to take out via surgery, then what to put in via chemotherapy and food, and eventually, to possible internal causes due to genetic flaws. Although everything and everyone seemed to be focused on my body, my thoughts were occupied with things outside of my body--from environmental carcinogens, to students, to writing deadlines. While much of the focus on trauma in the classroom has been on how to deal with traumatized students (links below), there has been less discussion of traumatized faculty, as if professors are somehow immune to the trauma students bring into the classroom. Yet, professors, like students, are embedded in environments that often cause trauma. How do we teach not only in the wake of the trauma of students, but also in the wake of our own traumas? Moreover, how can we shift individualistic narratives about trauma toward a cultural narrative, particularly in the context of the classroom? While we might idealistically like to keep personal trauma separate from the classroom, the realities of trauma tend to be messy. Trauma exceeds the boundaries we have worked so hard to establish. This is as true for professors as it is for students. To tell or not to tell When I was diagnosed, I was teaching two courses: one entirely online as part of the Council for Independent Colleges's Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction and one at a correctional institution using the inside-out model. I knew that I would not be able to continue shuttling students back and forth to a correctional institution following my surgery and that it was going to be difficult as I started chemo. My online students had grown accustomed to near-daily interactions in the spaces we had created for dialogue. My options, as I saw them, were to tell the students about the diagnosis, tell the students that I was sick, or not to tell the students anything. Regardless of the choice I made, my diagnosis would affect students and classroom dynamics. Do we invite students into our personal traumas or keep them out? What do we risk by putting students in proximity to personal trauma? What do we risk by trying to keep them out? What might students learn from watching their professors deal with illness or other personal traumas? Both classes had fewer than 20 students enrolled and I had formed connections with many of the students, so I weighed the options in this context and decided not to shield students from the details. I would be as honest as I could. Shifting the narrative One of the things that students might learn if we invite them into our personal traumas is how to shift the narrative of trauma from a narrative about individuals to a cultural one. In the case of my cancer, this means considering the "how did this happen question" without resorting to blaming my genetic line, the decisions of my parents, or my decisions about food and exercise. It is easy to like individualistic reasons for trauma. If you can figure out why I got colon cancer, you feel like you can protect yourself from this particular trauma by making better decisions. This is not unlike feeling that you can avoid rape by dressing modestly and not walking alone at night. While many have recognized the problem with responding to rape by calling on potential rape victims to change their habits, people with cancer continue to be advised to change their personal habits. Such advice shields the broader collective from having to make difficult decisions about the way we have organized our lives together, how that organization might be contributing to the rise in cancer, and the effects of a politics that marginalizes people with pre-existing conditions. Because my diagnosis coincided with the first-full scale attempt to dismantle the ACA, bringing my personal trauma into the classroom created space for students to see how collective decisions shape what might appear to be individual trauma. By naming trauma in the classroom, we invite students into the kinds of questions that can shift the narrative of blame from individuals who experience trauma toward systemic problems that reveal an economy willing to sacrifice some for the benefit of others. In shifting this narrative, students learn how to think about trauma as something that affects individuals, but often does not have individual causes. Trauma is often rooted in social decisions. Links: The Ethics of Trigger Warnings in the Classroom No Trigger Warnings in my class You Are Triggering Me!