TEACHING 9/11 IN THE CLASSROOM

On the morning of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush was reading to a group of school children in a second grade classroom. As a new professor, this image looms large in my mind as I think about teaching political science. The children siting in that classroom on that day would grow up with the upheavals of the post-September 11 wars rolling as an ordinary, perhaps even unexceptional, part of the background. Now, some fifteen years after the events of that day, I am seized by the question: how does one teach the political history of the post-September 11 wars to the post-September 11 generation?

This question is one that weaves together my personal and professional reflections about the past decade-and-a-half. On a personal level, the September 11 attacks formed the basis of my political consciousness. They occurred during the first week of my final year of high school and the ensuing controversies drew my attention to the drama of world politics. Over the next decade, a parallel structure of sorts unfolded: the conflicts “out there” offered up their horrid suffering for all to see, while my own political science education, from undergraduate to doctorate, followed a pace or two behind. It was an international relations lesson in real-time and filled me with a sense of personal and scholarly urgency. Today, as a young academic, I have arrived at a stage where my professional teaching and research interests reflect the trajectory of the past fifteen years. My next course, the next paper and the next research program, remain possessed by formative events that the great historian Eric Hobsbawm called “part of the past which is still part of my present.”

Momentous events often retain a stark immediacy, even if they are no longer front-page news. The passage of time, however, makes incongruous the analytical present in my mind and the actual present that moves inexorably forward. As a scholar of US foreign policy since 2001, I’m not so much living in the past as I am consumed with something that is slowly receding in time. In the classroom, this passage of time greatly affects the assumptions that instructors make about students, especially regarding what students know about the recent past. Right now, a decade-and-a-half after 9/11, the six-year olds listening to George W. Bush are passing through our university classrooms. What I’ve found remarkable is that this is a generation – or at least, an age cohort – that has no conscious memory of September 11 and little systematic understanding of the upheavals that followed. Even among my best students, there is a considerable gap between what I expect them to know about the recent past, and what they actually bring to the classroom. This is hardly a unique experience and I know for a fact that I’ve made professors of mine feel old at one point or another. But it seems to me that I’ve found myself in a moment of transition where the ever-present events in my own thoughts become the past, in need of analytical retelling for a younger age group.

This presents a significant pedagogical challenge for instructors of all ages. At its crux is the passage of time and the assumptions instructors make about students – specifically what students know about the recent past. Teaching is marked by a certain paradox: instructors get older while the undergraduates remain the same age. Our store of knowledge grows while the average stockpile of general knowledge among students remains about the same. Think about what the typical 18 to 22-year old undergraduate actually knows: whatever was taught in high school, perhaps some extracurricular reading, and maybe about five years absorption of current events. So surprise, it does not really add up to much.

Moreover, for the typical undergraduate student, the accumulation of lived memory of current events takes place within a narrow band of time. As each new cohort passes through university, that window of learning does not expand, but rather shifts forward along the historical continuum. The relative shortening of our students’ collective memory is most apparent in discussions of political timelines. Indeed, the events that have shaped our students’ formative years are only recent history to their instructors. The formative events in their instructors’ lifetimes are historical strands that need untangling and can’t be presumed as common knowledge. It forces us to answer the all-important question “so what?”

In my own classroom experiences as a graduate student and a new professor, I have tried to answer that question about the post-2001 period. Over the past two years, I have developed my own take on the matter. Into courses generically assigned as US foreign policy and Canadian defence policy, or International Relations: Questions and Challenges, I’ve wedged intensive case studies of the period since 2001. On each occasion, the primary narrative is the chronology of post-September 11 politics, supplemented by longer histories and sharper concepts which serve to contextualize key moments in our period of study.  In a sense, teaching the post-September 11 wars is not much different than teaching any other subject that predates the emergence of a student’s political consciousness. Students may be familiar the cultural touchstones in film, print or the vague sentiment of supporting troops, they still need to be presented with the story in a systematic way.

With only a few years of teaching to my credit, I can propose a working hypothesis: there is an inverse relationship between the accumulated knowledge of the instructor and what can be presumed as common knowledge. The lesson for professors is to adjust our own expectations of undergraduates to the time horizons within their lifetimes – not ours. We, as university educators should constantly remind ourselves that the further away a generation gets from the core events, often the less general knowledge can be presumed. My area of teaching and research, the post-September 11 wars, is not only recent but still unfolding and in the news every day so it is easy for me to assume a strong foundational knowledge. This presumption has been proven consistently, and sometimes spectacularly wrong. And it is the duty of the professor, in a position of learned authority, to find ways that bring the ever-present past into current moment.

Aaron Ettinger is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. His research has appeared in Security Dialogue, Millennium, Politics and International Journal. This post is based on “Teaching the Post-September 11 Wars to the Post-September 11 Generation” , forthcoming in Politics.

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