Once a shared experience fell into a history of students and teachers that had not yet been born when the attack occurred.
How the 9/11 terrorist attacks unfolded
The historic terrorist attack began at 8:46am on September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at the World Trade Center.
Joshua Rovner has been teaching about 9/11, 9/11 from the day it happened.
For years, he said, Robner asked undergraduates what he remembers that morning in 2001.
Around 2007 or 2008, their answers began to move from proven flashbacks of where the news broke to more abstract explanations of the fear and confusion they felt.
Today, he doesn’t mind asking that question.
Twenty-four years after the plane flies to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Shanksville, Pennsylvania fields, there is a context in which the way students learn about the day, and the lessons they take from it, will change and bring to the discussion, educators say.
Back in the early and mid-2000s, the discussion in the classroom during that “bad day” was full of passion, says Rovner, an associate professor of foreign policy and global safety at the American University School of International Services.
Today, it is essentially the opposite.
“On the other hand, it was difficult to teach after 9/11 because of emotions. But it was easy to teach because everyone was focused on the same thing. There was a lot of background knowledge,” he said. “Together with today’s students, I have no problem stimulating an analytical, objective, independent discussion of terrorism.”
As the years pass, he must spend more time teaching students background information about political and international climate before 2001, as well as background information about how Americans understood war and terrorism.
“We can’t start a discussion about strategic issues,” he said. “It’s not fair to me to assume they have that knowledge or are immersed in these ideas.”
Fact checks and meme culture in the context of the 9/11 lesson
Little students who know about 9/11 often come from social media. Melissa Nelson, assistant professor of practice at the University of Pittsburgh Education, says he can precede a full attempt to “raditify” people and adolescents who “radicate” children and adolescents on topics like September 11th.
In some respects, she said the prevalent jokes, memes and conspiracy theories that flood social media feeds could help them not take harsh topics too seriously. The job of an educator is to help them think critically about various sources.
“We were assistant principals in middle school, so when youth sort this, they’re not even sure what they’re laughing at,” Nelson said. “I see an opportunity at these moments to return to the skills they need to develop, taking into account the emotions of others and reviewing resources.”
The past isn’t the only place to teach about important national events like 9/11, Nelson said.
“We teach and inspire future policymakers, social workers, politicians, members of the military and national security and intelligence reporting agency, nurses, first responders, and children and adolescents who grow up to become community members.”
Teach a teacher
Not only did high school and college students today not live in 2001, but many young teachers either hadn’t been born or were too young to have memories of the day, Nelson said.
She directs future K-12 educators and helps them learn how to use a background in clinical psychology to teach about traumatic events.
“You don’t need to go through this yourself to teach this and help kids handle it and feel hopeful about what they can do in the future,” Nelson said.
Teachers without direct memory should rely heavily on key sources. This is an explanation of people who have experienced 9/11 first-hand, whether survivors or those who have died. On September 11th, the Memorial Museum and Museum will feature lesson plans, on-site and virtual tours, and professional development programs available to teachers.
Educators need to check themselves in about their feelings before telling their children about catastrophic events like 9/11, Nelson said. Give your children a sense of hope by talking with the hero about what the country has learned since then.
“Children and youth have a really great curiosity about every aspect of their world. They get clues from us about whether they are interested and how we present the information,” Nelson said. “Children are constantly looking for these actions. They want to come up with solutions.”
“For some, it’s ancient history.”
Michael Stoff, an associate professor emeritus in contemporary American history at the University of Texas Austin, has written since 2001 about how he deals with 9/11 in his junior high school history textbooks.
“We are now teaching generations of students that are history. For some, it’s ancient history like the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and World War II,” he said. “Pupils tend to blend them all together, and it all seems far from them… For this generation of students in high school, the defining moment in history is the Covid-19 pandemic, to get into college.”
They are also growing in a more globalized world than their predecessors, so it is important to teach what he calls “Five CS”: causes, effects, change, continuity, context. Teaching not only what happened, but why it happened, what happened, and what it took, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, So are changes in national security, privacy, immigration policies and rhetoric.
Michael Mark Cohen, professor of American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the first part of his undergraduate program, “Current History: Showing students the full news broadcast from the morning of September 11, 2001, so students can see how the country learned about the attacks and how the news media connected the information.
“In fact, I need to explain to them several times to another degree what a cell phone is and what a videotape is,” Cohen said.
Cohen said that students who chose to take the course on September 11th were eager to learn about the history of the event and how they influenced the world they grew up in, but that falls into a “gap” between memory and history. Unfortunately, the gap doesn’t exist in standard high school textbooks or curriculums, he said.
The student said in class, “Oh, yes, I saw a meme about it,” he said, adding that talking about 9/11 when the anniversary arrives without discussing the outcome and the history it was moving would be bothering young people.
“September 11 remains out of context, so it’s very difficult to actually convey the meaning to young people,” Cohen said.
For Rovner, teaching students about relatively recent events is different from teaching them about long-standing history.
They may have family members who remember living up to that day, or they may know someone from the Twin Towers. And they lived in the aftermath of a war with fear.
“They understand that it’s a really big deal if 9/11 wasn’t there yet,” Robner said.
