ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the importance of teachers developing their abilities to engage students in discussions on terrorism and creating pedagogical spaces inside classrooms in which students can express their concerns about the September 11 tragedy and their fears about the possibility of future attacks. One way to approach this task is to discuss, debate, analyze, and reflect upon the social and historical construction of such concepts as terrorism and patriotism. We believe that such concepts are not only ideologically constructed, but they are also intended to represent a narrow vision of the complex social world in which we live. Teachers can assist students develop a “language of critique”1 to guide them in investigating how such concepts are “selectively” employed by the ruling class to represent and reproduce existing relations of power among dominant and subordinate groups in society. For example, teachers can help students to understand how contemporary right-wing forces have taken advantage of the September 11 tragedy by making patriotism synonymous with the ideology of Americanism, and how terrorism is portrayed to represent violence by Arabs against Westerners and not vice versa.
