ABSTRACT
This chapter will describe the experiences of teachers, from a variety of disciplines (grades 6-12, again) working to address the events of 9/11 in their classrooms. My team and I conducted twenty-four in-depth, openended interviews, allowing teachers to tell us in their own words about their experiences of teaching such a painful and political topic in the context of scarce resources, hyper-standardization, high-stakes testing and ever more crowded and diverse classrooms. These interviews were either face to face or via the phone and typically lasted about 90 minutes. While the above chapter, based on the quantitative survey I conducted, gave us something of a snapshot of generally how often 9/11 is broached, what sort of activities teachers conduct and their impressions of what teaching about 9/11 is like, we need in-depth interviews to complete the picture of how this central event in U.S. history is being taught. Here teachers could go beyond the numbers to tell us directly what they are achieving, experiencing and facing in the classroom. I left the interviews largely open-ended but overall I asked teachers to tell me what sort of activities they had used, how they went about deciding what to do in the classroom, why they chose to ensure 9/11 was a part of their curriculum, how students, colleagues, parents and administrators had received their lessons, how they managed their own emotions while teaching about 9/11 and how they had navigated any relevant politics. I asked them to share any perceived problems or barriers to teaching about 9/11 and how they had handled them. For context I also asked them to tell me a bit about their school and classrooms-such as the resources available, school culture and demographics. Based on my interviews, some teachers are using teaching 9/11 to integrate and emphasize themes they already value. The themes that emerged the most clearly and frequently were tolerance, multiculturalism, diversity, critical thinking and patriotism.
