cracked:As for safe spaces, I’ll just describe what they were where I went to school. I graduated fr
cracked:As for safe spaces, I’ll just describe what they were where I went to school. I graduated from the University of Notre Dame, famous for (among other things) being one of the least LGBT-friendly universities in the country. A number of Notre Dame professors display a small rainbow sign outside their offices that simply read, “This is a safe space.” It was a sign that told students who were struggling with their sexual identity (on a campus that is, again, not friendly to gay people) that they could talk to that professor without fear. Maybe a minority student could come to that professor when he didn’t know how to handle the guys in his hall casually dropping the n-word around him and needed help valuing his cultural identity. That’s it. Safe spaces aren’t some club where nasty liberals sit around and bash cis straight white people. That’s what coffee houses and drama clubs are for. In my experience, they’re basically just small environments where students could go to not casually have “n****r” or “f****t” slung in their direction. Trigger warnings and safe spaces get so conflated because they’re both meant to evoke the same criticism – that we’re coddling college students instead of exposing them to new ideas. But if a student has been so damaged by a previous experience that they literally can’t focus on the lesson, then something needs to be done to help that student. We’re not “preparing students for the real world” by re-exposing them to things from the real world that have already messed them up pretty bad.This Is What Safe Spaces & Trigger Warnings Actually Are -- source link