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| VOICES ON: Teaching After September 11 As Coordinator of College Writing Programs at Queens College—CUNY, Hugh English coordinates efforts in Writing across the Curriculum, including the development of writing-intensive curricula and pedagogy. Having worked for nine years as director, associate director, or codirector of three composition programs in three public universities in the Northeast, Hugh now extends those efforts into the development of a writing culture across the curriculum and within particular disciplines. His own writing takes up topics in the fields of Composition/Rhetoric, Writing Program Administration, and Modern American Literature.  Do you think that we all teach differently after the tragedy of September 11?
Certainly, we need to find ways to continue teaching our planned curricula and to build deeper connections [so that] what we do may have some relevance in our troubled world. Immediately following the attacks, it became impossible not to engage somehow the palpable fact that we experienced a terribly painful and terribly frightening time. In the month or two following the attacks on the WTC, almost everybody I was in contact with was, of course, shocked, feeling immense pain, truly terrorized, and often terribly fearful too of some of the political rhetoric that quickly emerged from U.S. leaders. I am finding it of great help to inform myself and to think with others about how historical understandings might be the most important intellectual contribution that we can make at this moment. We have needed to create opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to understand and to think about history and geopolitics. We need to be working towards ways that we can respond to what is happening—as teachers and humans. It quickly became apparent that most Americans lacked both information and any larger sense of historical framing for the events of 9/11. Certainly, we need teach-ins, or better yet, conversational opportunities for people to share information, to discuss their responses and those of our government. And, we need to defend the university against attacks on the right to dissent, to differ, to offer a worldview, historical understandings, and geopolitical analyses that differ from those offered by Bush and Rumsfeld and echoed mostly uncritically in much of the corporate media. At CUNY, we have had to defend academic freedom—even the understanding of the university itself as a place of discussion—against our own chancellor and Board of Trustees. How did you address the tragedy in your first class after September 11?
After the attack, those who came to my class expressed their appreciation when we didn't proceed as if everything was "normal." For one thing, few had managed to do the reading, or much of anything besides their jobs and basic living strategies between Tuesday and our Thursday class. This graduate class of mostly M.S.Ed. students—mostly current middle-school and high-school teachers—absolutely needed conversation, a chance to speak their feelings. Only one reported that there was any effort in her own school to address how teachers were feeling and responding to the preparation for their students returning to school. Several reported that they were expressly prohibited by school authorities from addressing the issues and feelings surrounding the attack. In this context, I tried to produce a context for people to begin to explore both feeling and thinking about the attacks. Should a teacher maintain a sense of "normalcy" within the classroom after a tragedy such as September 11?
Immediately after the attacks and then again immediately after the U.S. bombing started, I was not able to function normally and I didn't expect my students to do so, although I've also certainly been trying to carry on with dailiness and to do so with as much compassion as possible. I certainly understand how it's helpful to many to carry on some version of normalcy, although I'm deeply suspicious of the ways that this "normalcy" was immediately urged upon us as a response to the terror. Actually, the imperative to carry on as if things were normal contradicted the proclamation of historical rupture—"everything has changed" or "America's new war." Somehow the argument that we should act as if things were normal joined with the false construction of historical rupture, rather than, say, a sense that the events of September 11 have some continuity with what happened before and with U.S. foreign policy for the past fifty years. These strange twins—normalcy and rupture—work together, it seems, to make it increasingly impossible to name precisely what has changed and what is really historically continuous. What happens when there is no public acknowledgment of the tremendous emotional and psychic weight of this event and what appears to be coming after it? Stoic response to terror followed by righteous vengeance? And the cycle of violence continues. I increasingly feel that the urge to act normal, not to take the time for full expression of tangled, complex feelings of fear, sorrow, and anger, makes the retaliatory response of vengeance the default position. All of us are probably hearing horrific articulations of plans for Arab-Americans and for the perceived external enemy. In addition to the frequent, imprecise articulation of a desire to bomb indiscriminately, I have heard a desire for deportations. Untangling immediate emotional responses from considered social behavior requires speaking, listening, reading, writing. As NYC teachers, we may not be digging through the material wreckage, but we do have some role here. How should teachers facilitate conversations about how students are responding to events?
Can we invent ways of transforming our classrooms into centers of compassion? I know that classrooms are not typically explicit loving spaces but we need to make space for us and our students to feel pain and fear, and also to think about history, geopolitics, media representations and the manufacture of consent, economic and political struggles domestically. Immediately following the attacks, we in NYC could not assume that people gathered in our classrooms and our workplaces were not also among those waiting to hear about missing loved ones or those having already heard terribly painful individual news. I am truly at a loss about how to deal with this possibility, while also making space for the expression of our feelings and our ability to think about these experiences. I think and think and only compassion, compassion, compassion seems at all possible as a response. Besides compassion, what advice do you have for teachers? What would you like to see happen in the classroom in response to the tragedy?
Well, let me say first that compassion is itself extremely difficult, if we mean the sort that includes a compassionate response to those who appear to be enemies. In the groups of faculty and students with whom I've been involved, we needed immediately to discuss strategies, to share information, to share teaching resources and knowledge. Many of us who may be even moderately informed at this point may have shallow understanding of the last several decades of United States involvement in "the Middle East," Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. I have had several conversations with historians that have really helped me . . . to start responding with my head as well as my heart. What our students and Americans absolutely need now is information about the deep historical connections, the historical emergence of the current "global disorder." We need to practice compassion and work for peace and global justice. Let's do what we can to help each other—our colleagues, our students, our brothers and sisters everywhere. |
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