What Consent Teaches Us About Teaching

As a certified theatrical intimacy director, I work in professional and academic rehearsal rooms helping performers clarify physical and emotional boundaries while choreographing scenes of staged intimacy. Consent is at the forefront of that work, and I began to notice the broader concept of consent was also shaping my work as a voice teacher and classroom educator.

Learning is an inherently vulnerable act. Just as the relationship between actor and director requires trust, accountability and confidence that one’s boundaries will be honored, so too does the relationship between student and teacher. This made me wonder: What would happen if I thought of consent as pedagogy?

Defining Consent

We often think of consent in relation to its legalistic definition (obtaining a clear yes without coercion). But in reality consent is much more nuanced. It is highly relational, constantly negotiated and must be maintained with care, clarity and transparency. Classroom environments present additional complications in that true consent can be clouded by power dynamics, institutional expectations and cultural or identity-based factors. 

For students, professors often represent academic success, professional opportunity and disciplinary expertise. Faculty assign grades, offer mentorship, write recommendations and sometimes help students make industry connections. Even when students are well-versed in consent language, academic norms may still condition them to say yes to faculty requests without pause.

Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, one of the flagship theatrical intimacy training organizations, offers a framework for understanding consent in the context of power dynamics in the performing arts that maps seamlessly onto academic spaces as well. Under the CRISP Framework, consent is considered, reversible, informed, specific and participatory. Students have time to think, the ability to change their minds without retribution, access to relevant information, clarity about what they are agreeing to and opportunities to shape the process.

Students demonstrate consent by participating in discussion, revising work in response to feedback, moving through classroom activities, offering creative ideas and taking intellectual or interpretive risks. However, there are several ways faculty can make student consent more explicit in course planning, management and assessment. 

Course Planning and Student-Centered Course Syllabi

A syllabus is often framed as the contract between faculty and students. A consent-forward syllabus makes expectations visible and sets the overall tone. Professors can use this document to introduce their nonnegotiables as an initial framework for course expectations. It tells students what to call you, how to contact you, how quickly they can expect a response, how attendance and late work are handled, how grades are stored and accessed, what role technology may play in the classroom, and when major assignments are due. The goal is to reduce guesswork about procedures so students can focus on the intellectual exercise of learning. 

Since syllabi are often presented on the first day of class, students have time to consider their contents. If they would rather not engage with the material in the way you propose, they still have time to drop the course without penalty. 

Classroom Culture, Participation and Assessment

One concrete way to invite consent into your classroom is developing a community agreement with your students. Community agreements are group expectations designed collaboratively, which fulfills the participatory aspect of the CRISP framework. This is a great first-day activity that shows students that their input into the class culture is a vital part of your collective experience. A useful prompt could simply be “What do I need to do my best work?” Create multiple pathways for students to contribute, including discussion, anonymous forms or handwritten responses.

Giving everyone in the room the opportunity to participate in setting the tone creates greater ownership of the space as well as an increased sense of belonging. And, if everyone helps to set the tone, everyone can be held accountable. For example, a recent class agreement named that the students needed honesty without judgment, patience and kindness, room for perspectives to evolve, and a commitment to address conflict directly and respectfully. The atmosphere in this room was always cordial, even when emotions were heightened around difficult topics.

Consent-forward pedagogy also means paying attention to how we ask students to participate. Questions like “Is it OK if we … ?” or “It’s fine if we do this, right?” imply compliance. More open-ended prompts create more space for genuine response. Faculty at Theatrical Intimacy Education suggest the acronym “WTF” as a reminder of the types of open-ended questions that inspire real engagement with material: “How would it work to … ?” “What would you think of … ?” “How would you feel about … ?” 

Consent-forward environments leave room for choice. For example, students might be given five minutes to talk with a neighbor, write down thoughts or think quietly. Assessment choices can also create agency: A student might choose between a brief presentation and a short research paper. 

Repairing Harm When Consent Breaks Down

None among us are perfect. There will be times when a community agreement is not honored or it is clear harm has been done. Faculty can model repair as an essential practice in learning and in life: Name the harm without shame and without asking the person who has been harmed to explain or justify their response. If you are the one that caused the harm, you might say something like, “I see that didn’t land as I intended. Let’s take a minute and reset together.” If someone calls someone out, you might say, “Thank you for naming that. Let’s talk about it.” Faculty can demonstrate that accountability is an essential part of maintaining an environment where consent can thrive, even when emotions are running high. 

Practicing Consent in the Classroom

Consent is a foundational concept in interpersonal interaction, but in academic spaces we often treat it as assumed rather than as something to be cultivated. Faculty do not need to redesign every course from the ground up to begin working in more consent-forward ways. We can start by making expectations clearer, offering students meaningful choices, inviting them into the creation of classroom culture and modeling repair when harm occurs. These small shifts can have a profound effect. They remind students learning is not something done to them, but something they enter into with agency, curiosity and responsibility. When consent becomes part of our pedagogy, the classroom becomes a space where students can practice the habits of ethical participation they will carry into their work, their communities and their lives.