How has teaching about 9/11 changed since 2001? We asked educators.

Joshua Rovner has been teaching about 9/11 since the day it happened.

For years, Rovner would ask his undergraduate students what they remembered about that morning in 2001, he said.

Around 2007 or 2008, their answers started to shift from play-by-play recollections of where they were when the news broke to more abstract descriptions of the fear or confusion they felt.

Today, he doesn’t bother asking that question.

Twenty-four years after airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the way students learn about that day, and the lessons they take from it, have changed, along with the context they bring to the discussion, educators say.

Back in the early- and mid-2000s, classroom discussions of that "terrible day" were filled with passion, said Rovner, an associate professor of foreign policy and global security at American University's School of International Service.

Today, it’s practically the opposite.

“On the one hand, it was difficult to teach after 9/11 because of the emotion. But it was easier to teach because everybody was focused on the same thing. There was plenty of background knowledge,” he said. “(With) students today, I don’t have any problem stimulating an analytical, objective, detached discussion of terrorism.”

As the years go by, he has to spend more time teaching students background information about the attacks, the political and international climate pre-2001, and how Americans understood war and terrorism.

“We can’t simply launch into a discussion about issues of strategy,” he said. “It's not fair of me to assume they have that knowledge or they've been steeped in these ideas.”

Fact-checking and meme culture in the context of 9/11's lessons

What little students know about 9/11 often comes from social media. Getting ahead of disinformation and outright attempts to “radicalize” children and adolescents about topics like 9/11 is more important now than ever, said Melissa Nelson, an assistant professor of practice in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. 

In some ways, the pervasive jokes, memes and conspiracy theories flooding social media feeds can make them take tough topics less seriously, she said. It’s the educators’ job to help them think critically about various sources of information.  

“Having been an assistant principal in a middle school, there are a lot of times when adolescents are sorting through this, and they’re not even sure themselves what it is they’re laughing about,” Nelson said. “I see opportunity in these moments … to move them back toward skills that they need to develop, like vetting resources, considering the emotions of others.” 

Teaching about important national events like 9/11 isn't just about the past, Nelson said.

"We're teaching and inspiring children and adolescents who will grow up to be future policymakers, social workers, politicians, members of the military and national security and intelligence organizations, nurses, first responders, community members.” 

Teaching the teachers

Not only were today's high school and college students not alive in 2001, but many younger teachers were also either not born yet or too young to have memories of that day, Nelson said.

She instructs future K-12 educators and uses her background in clinical psychology to help them learn how to teach about traumatic events. 

“To do an excellent job of teaching about this and helping children process this and then feel hope about what they can do in the future, you don't have to have experienced this yourself,” Nelson said. 

Teachers without firsthand memories should rely heavily on primary sources – the accounts of people who experienced 9/11 firsthand, whether they were survivors or lost loved ones, she suggested. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum has lesson plans, onsite and virtual tours, and professional development programs available for teachers.

Educators should check in with themselves about their own emotions before talking to kids about a devastating event like 9/11, Nelson said. Make sure to give kids a sense of hope by talking about heroes and what the country has learned since then.  

“Children and adolescents really have a wonderful curiosity about all aspects of their world. They take their cues from us as far as whether they're interested or not, how we are presenting the information,” Nelson said. “Children always have these calls for action. They want to think of solutions.” 

'For some it's ancient history'

Michael Stoff, an associate professor emeritus of modern U.S. history at the University of Texas at Austin, has written about how treating 9/11 in the middle and high school history textbooks he's co-authored has changed since 2001.

"We're teaching a generation of students now for whom it's history, and for some it's ancient history like the Vietnam War or the Korean War or World War II," he said. "Students tend to blend all of those things together, and it all seems distant to them … For this generation of students in high school and entering college, the defining moment in history is the COVID-19 pandemic."

They've also grown up in a more globalized world than their predecessors, so teaching them what he calls "the five Cs" is important: cause, consequence, change, continuity and context. Teaching not just what happened, but why it happened, and what happened in the aftermath ‒ including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as changes in national security, privacy, immigration policy, and rhetoric.

Michael Mark Cohen, an American studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley, spends the first part of his undergraduate course "A History of the Present: The U.S. Since 9/11/2001” showing his students a full news broadcast from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, so students can see how the country learned about the attacks and how the news media pieced together information.

“I actually have to explain to them to one degree or another what pay phones are, what videotape is,” Cohen said.

Cohen said his students, who choose to take his course on 9/11, are eager to learn about the history of the event and how it’s impacted the world they grew up in, but it falls into a “gap” between memory and history – the memory of people who are older and remember living through it, and the generation of young people too far removed to have a direct personal connection. That gap is unfortunately absent from standard high school textbooks and curricula, he said.

Sometimes students will remark in class, “Oh yeah, I saw a meme about that,” he said, adding that it’s a disservice to young people to only talk about 9/11 when the anniversary arrives without discussing its consequences and the history it set in motion.

“9/11 remains so taken out of context that it’s very hard to actually communicate its meaning to young people,” Cohen said.

To Rovner, teaching students about relatively recent events is different than teaching about long-ago history.

They may have family members who remember living through that day or knew someone in the Twin Towers. And they’ve lived in the aftermath of the war on terror.

“They still understand 9/11 was a really big deal even though they weren’t there for it,” Rovner said.