ABSTRACT
The resources on the Iraq War analyzed in this book constitute instances of educational and political discourse at the same time. As instances of educational discourse, they are revealing of embedded pedagogies, identities, and systems of knowledge and beliefs. As instances of political discourse, they are imbued with notions of citizenship and political ideologies. In all parts of the book, the political is intermingled with the educational, revealing how struggles over different political interests and goals play out in the design of educational materials. The aim of this book has not been to question the pedagogies used 1 or to claim that one is better than the other, but rather to foreground their deeper political nature and to illustrate some constitutive elements of the pedagogies. However, this position should not be seen as a claim to neutrality and impartiality. Far from it. The critical methodology employed in the book is based on the premise that any approach adopted by an analyst is filtered by her subjectivity, and that is also true of this book. It also considers all ways of understanding as historically and culturally relative, and knowledge as a product not of an objective observation of the world, but of the social processes and interactions through which people constantly engage each other.
