9/11 and Collective Memory in US Classrooms

Teaching About Terror

Cheryl Lynn Duckworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317805946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Historia de la educación

While current literature stresses the importance of teaching about the 9/11 attacks on the US, many questions remain as to what teachers are actually teaching in their own classrooms. Few studies address how teachers are using of all of this advice and curriculum, what sorts of activities they are undertaking, and how they go about deciding what they will do. Arguing that the events of 9/11 have become a "chosen trauma" for the US, author Cheryl Duckworth investigates how 9/11 is being taught in classrooms (if at all) and what narrative is being passed on to today's students about that day.

Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered from US middle and high school teachers, this volume reflects on foreign policy developments and trends since September 11th, 2001 and analyzes what this might suggest for future trends in U.S. foreign policy. The understanding that the "post-9/11 generation" has of what happened and what it means is significant to how Americans will view foreign policy in the coming decades (especially in the Islamic World) and whether it is likely to generate war or foster peace.

1 Classrooms, and a Country, Cope

THE MOURNING AFTER

One of the most common questions a citizen might ask another citizen when reflecting on some shared collective grief or trauma is, “Where were you then?” Given that this work is an exploration of the role of historical memory with regards to how we tell ourselves the story of what happened on 9/11—and therefore what we tell our students—it seems appropriate to begin with a brief reflection on where I myself was that ironically gorgeous September morning. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was standing in front of my freshman English high school classroom in Fredericksburg, VA. As students filed in for the beginning of second period, one student—the class clown, strangely enough—told me I needed to turn on the TV.

I laughed, ignoring his advice and welcoming him to class.

He repeated himself: “You should turn on the TV. Something’s happened.”

In 2001 we were well into the cell phone age, and a couple of other students were already receiving calls from friends and family. (Our school was not too far south from Arlington, VA, and many of our students had parents working at Langley or the Pentagon.) Soon an announcement came over the PA system. I turned on the TV to CNN and watched the Twin Towers burn and crumble with twenty or so fourteen-year-olds. We dismissed early that day, and I drove home knowing everything had changed. I can recall phoning my father (who served in the Army twenty-six years) and asking him if World War III had started. He said yes, he believed so. Later that week, our school had an emergency staff meeting centered on taking care of ourselves and coping with any trauma our students might be experiencing. The meeting began with the facilitator asking us how we ourselves were doing, a kindness which I still remember. As it happened, at least one of our students lost her father (who worked at the Pentagon). She withdrew from school and her family moved away, presumably to try to start over.

Like many of us, what I recall most vividly over ten years later is that infamous image of the planes themselves, having been turned into a missile, crashing into the Towers. What I admit to be an overdose of media coverage on my part, seared into my mind the picture of the smoke and flames and the gaping hole in the Trade Center, against a vivid blue sky. For me the most horrific detail was the realization that the small black ovals falling from the Towers were people who had jumped. I took the following couple of days of class to open the classroom floor up for sharing of any thoughts or feelings my students (high school freshman and sophomores in English) might have. Like most of us, they expressed fear, pain, shock and confusion. They wondered what it might mean for the future. One student in 7^th period—I can still see her short strawberry blonde hair and freckles, though I admit I can’t remember her name—brought me a set of pictures she had printed out from the Web; they were images of vigils that had been held worldwide in the aftermath of the attacks. One was of the late Yasser Arafat donating blood; I wondered: did she know who he was? Did she understand the political or historical significance of someone including his picture? She mentioned to me that she brought them since I was apparently the only teacher who had discussed the attacks in the classroom. Wanting to counter the idea the U.S. was globally hated, a misimpression many of my students harbored, I posted a few of the vigil pictures up on the bulletin board.

In the days immediately following, I can remember crying at random and unexpected moments, driving home from work or running errands. I will forever associate the U2 ballad “Peace on Earth” with the events of 9/11, as my local radio station played it incessantly in the weeks following the attacks. Neighbors and strangers seemed unusually patient and kind, greeting one another in line at gas stations and grocery stores. I found myself ending each conversation with family by saying, “I love you”. Grieving as so many were in the raw days afterword, I sat with several friends glued to CNN. Needing to express the sadness and rage, I wrote the below poem and have often shared it with students on the memorial date of 9/11.

The sky is falling—Ashes, Armageddon,

Clouds of metal rain.

Six hundred miles south in safety,

how dare the sun shine?

The breeze is mild and warm

as I thunder inside,

the only lightning within my chest,

the only rain pours down my cheeks,

while my fists shake like crumblingtowers.

It joins thousands of other news articles, photos, keepsakes, letters, saved cell phone messages, poems and media footage as a real-time documentation of what occurred. Together these represent the raw material for the collective narrative that is still being shaped about the meaning of 9/11 and its impact. Have we, as a nation, now processed it and recovered, and moved on? Did 9/11 in fact fundamentally reshape how Americans understand ourselves (themselves) or has there been some sort of return to normal? How will today’s middle and high school students view 9/11 and by extension “the Islamic World”? (Because this phrase, if we really reflect on it, can refer to countries as dramatically different as Albania, Indonesia and Lebanon, I dislike it. Hence the quotes. That said, it is commonly used and so I adopt it for convenience.) Will they indeed associate the two or will they (one prays) have been educated into a more contextualized, historically grounded and nuanced view of the relationship been the U.S. and the world’s Muslims? A core reason for this book, of course, is to ask and contribute to the answers to these urgent questions.

For me 9/11 was how best to respond as an educator and a global citizen. I found myself saving the newspapers from the days immediately subsequent. My stint in Zimbabwe as Peace Corps volunteer was suddenly, unpredictably salient. The need to reconnect with the global community, as I had experienced it many times as an expatriate, was fierce. I am certain that this is a large part of why I decided to ultimately leave teaching English and pursue international peace and conflict studies. Perhaps it is even part of why I am writing this book now. I share these details of my own experience of 9/11 because of the importance of reflexivity in this sort of study. While some of my data is quantitative, some is qualitative and this always calls for analysis of one’s biases, experiences, motives and positionality. Most importantly, as the above recounting of my memories of 9/11 make clear, I cannot escape my own identity as an American. I was raised in the military, have served my country overseas (again in the Peace Corps), taught in our nation’s juvenile prisons, and identify myself as a patriot. What a complicated word “patriot” has become! This requires me of course to guard against any bias resulting from this positionality. Rather than pretending to an impossible objectivity, I will rather make the strongest case I can for the analysis and conclusions that I will present in the forthcoming chapters.

Each year of teaching in middle or high school following the attacks, on 9/11, I would invite students to share any memories, thoughts or questions they had. My experiences seem typical. I became concerned about the lack of information or incorrect information students have absorbed. Even more concerning was the Islamophobia some exhibited. Reflecting, no doubt, the adults in their lives, some students believed Saddam Hussein was the mastermind behind 9/11. Others reported they had heard former President George W. Bush had had a role. During my time teaching in a northern VA juvenile detention home (2007–2010), my classroom was only a fifteen-minute drive from the Pentagon. Many of my students had personally seen the gaping wound in the Pentagon and the subsequent reconstruction. When I worked at a think-tank in DC, I would pass it each day, amazed anew that security at the bus depot at the Metro’s Pentagon station was not tighter. All I needed to be mere feet from the Pentagon itself was metro fare. Like so many others, I visited Ground Zero in the years ensuing; this was in 2006, and so much of the cleaning, clearing and reconstruction had already taken place. Yet the images and emotions of shock, fear, anger and grief remained. One cool spring afternoon of 2002, about seven months after 9/11, I was walking along the National Mall with thousands of others, when the shadow of a small plane glided along the grass. My body tensed and I squinted up at that plane, watching it with anxiety as it flew by the Washington Monument. Only once it had gone by did I realize that those around me were watching the plane as well, apparently thinking along the same horrific lines that I was—a living visualization of collective trauma.

Learning of the 2004 attacks on the pre-school in Beslan, Russia, perhaps also sheds light on the experience of what we might call “indirect” trauma (i.e., trauma that we did not personally experience). Collective trauma is where the personal and the public, even the political, intersect. The reader likely remembers that, after a hostage standoff with Russian authorities, nearly 400 people were killed. About half of the dead were under the age of five. I can recall crying at the news, as perhaps plenty of educators did. During a trip to the grocery store shortly after the Beslan Massacre, I was in view of perhaps it must have been Time or Newsweek, which of course featured heartrending pictures of besieged children and bereaved parents. The tears flowed as I handed the cashier my Mastercard. Upon reflection, I have to wonder if I would have reacted quite that viscerally in the absence of 9/11. Was there something residual here?

Naturally, the more time passed, the less my students were personally able to recall the attacks of 9/11. At this writing, the year is 2013 and so those born during 2001 are today’s 6^th or 7^th graders. The most immediate connection for them by 2010 or 2011 was having family members deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or stories they had been told by parents or other older friends or family. I was not at all surprised that some of my Muslim and/or Arab students spoke of various forms of being stereotyped and discriminated against. By far the most contentious debates we had in class, the ones which most challenged my facilitation skills, were about the role of Islam in American life and in the world. To encourage honest discussion of the role of fear in perpetuating conflict and violence, I would share a story of my own irrational fear with my students. I am embarrassed now to admit how much fear I felt when, on a flight from DC to San Francisco to visit my sister in 2002, only months after the attacks, a middle-aged man in a turban boarded the plane with me. My eyes were on him continuously throughout the flight. Needless to say, all was well, but the shock of realizing how susceptible I was to such irrational fear has stayed with me. Often would I share this story with students hoping my transparency and vulnerability, which I consider to be two traits of effective peace educators, would encourage them to articulate and examine their own fears.

I recount all of this, my own personal experience of that day and its reverberations, since an important theoretical framework for this study on the teaching of 9/11 is historical (or collective) memory (Halbwachs 1992; Volkan 1998, Olick et al. 2011). Coined by Halbswachs, this term refers to how various identity groups, such as a nation, religious group or socio-economic class, collaboratively and collectively interpret their shared past. Based on the examples Halbswach elaborates, collective memory can address a particular event, but it can also address a shared understanding of a particular trend or general reading of history. For example, he suggests that different socio-economic classes have a particular reading of history that is probably not shared in other class groups (120–166). So we need to be careful here—a collective memory is of course not an uncontested memory. To the extent that a particular historical event, like 9/11, generates something we can call consensus, it is important to deconstruct and pull the veil back on how that consensus was developed (or as Foucault would have it, manufactured). One of the most essential outcomes of education is to be able to ask critical questions, tolerate some ambiguity and assess the credibility of information. We must teach students to understand the power dynamics of how history is written and to assess the implications of differing versions of history. In today’s classrooms, arguably few events have shaped the lives of our students (and ourselves) more than 9/11 and yet as my research shows, this seminal “before and after” rending of the American story is not being substantively addressed in our classrooms. While some teachers are indeed implementing creative and comprehensive units on 9/11 in their classrooms, this at least based on my own findings remains the exception when it must become the rule. A lack of an historically literate and nuanced understanding of 9/11, I fear, will result in the status quo of ignorance, violence and mistrust between the U.S. and “the Islamic World” being perpetuated. As a colleague commented recently during a conference at which I was presenting this research, 9/11 seems to have become a symbol of the relationship between America and the world’s Muslims (American Muslims included). This narrative must urgently be improved if we are to achieve sustainable peace and security.

A post-modern understanding of scholarship does not require us to separate the personal from the empirical, or to hide behind a modernist or positivist notion of detached objectivity. I more often than not find such detached objectivity to be an illusion. This is perhaps especially true when exploring a concept such as collective memory, which is precisely an exploration of how individuals become connected to and find identity and meaning in larger socio-historical events and processes. I am further aware that I myself am a member of the group (Americans) whose collective memory I am studying. This made reflexivity seem especially important. Hence my choice to share at length some of my own personal memories and reflections on 9/11, in and out of the classroom.

The question also arises do I actually remember what I believe I remember? Much has been written on the instability, unreliability and ephemeral nature of memory (Engel 1999, Roberts 2002, Sturken 1997). I have personal and professional journals I can look back at for verification of memory and details. Media coverage was of course constant and memorial coverage occurs each year on 9/11. Yet our knowledge of how memory actually works, both personally and collectively, compels me to wonder how accurate my memory is. Some of the details would not amount to much, such as if the strawberry blonde in 7^th period who brought me the 9/11 vigil pictures from around the world, was actually perhaps in 6^th period. Memories of mine such as standing in line to donate blood and being turned away because the donation sites were overwhelmed by the response could be confirmed by other people. Similar reports were in the media as well. On the weekend after 9/11 (9/11 was a Tuesday) one evening I visited a friend at her house. A flag flew in front of every suburban townhouse on her street. At dusk that night, neighbors emerged carrying flags, candles and lighters in what was part of a national vigil. I had not recalled that the vigil was national, in fact, until research for this book refreshed my memory. This exemplifies how collective memory is shaped and navigated collaboratively in ways of which we are often consciously unaware. Collective memory is, in a complicated way, both individual and social, with both shared and personal aspects. For me, again, a major impulse shaping what 9/11 meant for me was as an educator. For my friend, it was as a parent and, significantly, as an Iranian-American. In fact, she shared with me a story of her brother being harassed by officials at airports, one tale of thousands more like it, which shape the collective memory of 9/11.

Others aspects of my own 9/11 narrative, such as my perceived clear memory of my father’s certainty that WWIII had started, seem more suspect. I remember it clearly, but would he? Would he also recall expressing the wish to reenlist in the Army? Did he in fact say this or is the memory my subconscious expression of a daughter’s fear? The nature of memory itself does not permit me be to certain without confirmation. We live our lives as narratives. We do not just tell stories. We are stories. For this reason it is crucial that we empower students to internalize this truth, articulate their own stories, empathize with those of others, and interpret why certain people might tell a particular history in such a different way. We often think of these sorts of qualities as values, and in some sense this is true, but in an important pedagogical sense, these qualities in a person are also skills. They can be taught.

SHAPERS OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Collective memory, as we have said, refers to the way in which a social group (typically an ethnic, cultural or political group) recalls and makes meaning around a particularly significant event in their history. Typically, this would be a deeply traumatic event, such as military occupation, genocide or civil war—or of course, a terrorist attack. Through various social, political and economic mechanisms, process or institutions, the narratives of the collective trauma are diffused throughout the society. These institutions are often stakeholders in, or even direct parties to, whatever conflict led to the traumatic event. They include of course governments, who typically seek to codify their own narrative of the conflict into the “set” historical record (Passerini 2005, Cole 2007). Everything from history textbooks to news coverage of the event in question, to museums or memorials that shape the narrative of what happened for future generations, can be implicated in this process of transgenerational trauma, which will be discussed at more length below (Volkan 1998). I am struck by the fact that many of the key institutions relevant to shaping and diffusing collective memory—family, faith institutions, schools, the media—are present in my own vignette. These institutions, as others have also observed, link the micro to the macro, the personal to the political. They are the sites where collective memory is shaped, contested and negotiated.

Surprisingly, while volumes have been written about 9/11, very little of it has yet explored the events of that day through the lens of chosen trauma and subsequent transgenerational transmission of trauma. Some of it has discussed the political and military response from various political perspectives (Bacevich 2013). Other works examine intelligence failures and similar topics leading up to 9/11 (Clarke 2009). Some works tell the story of particular families or survivors. There are some works which deal with the longer term, profound cultural impact of 9/11 and how it has arguably transformed America (Faludi 2007, Morgan, et al. 2009, Alden 2008). Some works discuss 9/11 as related to the cultural myths legitimizing American militarism both before and after 2001 (Muller-Fahrenholz 2006, Hughes 2004). Investigative journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin document the stunning proliferation of the national security state in direct response to 9/11—the vast sums of money and seeming inability to question government leadership that they describe is indicative of collective trauma (Priest and Arkin 2011). Yet none of these take the approach of viewing 9/11 through the lens of chosen trauma. Next I will examine this theory, and then why I believe 9/11 can usefully be seen as a chosen trauma. I will then relate this to the importance of understanding the collective narrative students are receiving about 9/11 in the classroom.

CHOSEN TRAUMA THEORY

To date, an impressive amount of work has been accomplished on this intersection of collective memory and conflict resolution, especially by peace educators and dialogue facilitators interested in understanding how one generation bequeaths, if you will, the memory of a particular shared trauma to the following generation. Volkan, Julius and Montville (1990) applied theories and concepts of psychodynamics to the understanding of international relations. Volkan (1998) seminally referred to this process of one generation inheriting the chosen trauma of their parents as “trans-generational transmission” (p. 43). Transgenerational trauma is a key building block of his theory of chosen trauma and describes how parents, teachers, media figures, community leaders and political officials can instill in the next generation the trauma of their experience, as well as the enemy images, emotions of hostility and fear, biases, and often Manichean worldview, especially with regards to a perceived enemy. In some instances, this is a largely unconscious process. Volkan, the father of this theory who writes from a psychoanalytic perspective, describes the process of transgenerational trauma like so: “Core personal and large-group identity processes become intertwined when the reservoirs that receive the children’s unintegrated “good” self- and object-images and associated affects have two characteristics: (1) they are sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Classrooms, and a Country, Cope
• 2 Peace Education, Chosen Trauma and Collective Memory in the Classroom
• 3 Inside the Classroom
• 4 Educator Narratives of Teaching Terror
• 5 School Culture and the Power of Neoliberalism
• 6 Teaching 9/11 as an Opportunity for Narrative Transformation
• Appendix A: Survey of Teachers
• Appendix B: Interview Guide
• References
• Index