Teaching 9/11: Educators help the New York Times mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks
RSSBy Lauren Barack
| Schulten | Epstein Ojalvo |
Teachers and librarians looking to cover September 11th in the classroom will find an especially rich trove of content in the Learning Network, the educational arm of the .
In addition to select content from the ’ archive and related lesson plans, the resource will include crowdsourced ideas from educators who’ve responded to an open call on the network blog. The goal was to have on-the-ground teachers tell us what they’re doing for the 10th anniversary of the attacks, says Katherine Schulten, a former teacher and producer at the Learning Network, who’s run it since 2006.
“The issue is the teaching problem,” she says. “How do you incorporate the news of the day into a curriculum that’s really set in stone?” Another challenge: helping kids who have no memory of the event grasp its significance.
Educators and students have long turned to the Learning Network, mining the blog for its resources based on current events and related ’ content. To boot, teachers, librarians, and kids can access everything for free, as the network is unrestricted by the newspaper’s paywall. On the blog, Schulten and producer Holly Epstein Ojalvo, also a former teacher, post a question each day for students; for the 10th anniversary, they will invite students to share their own experience of September 11, 2001.
As of press time, teachers had started posting on the site the lessons they’ve been using or plan to use with students. One teacher described taking three different newspaper front pages from September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks, and asking students to compare the impact of headlines and images, as well as the differing perspectives. Other educators plan to use Mordicai Gerstein’s (Roaring Brook, 2003), have students interview family members about where they were that day, and discuss the 9/11 Commission Report. One sculpture teacher is designing a monument to coordinate with the anniversary.
Schulten is also working with the National Writing Project (NWP), and on September 8 will participate in a NWP Radio program to discuss September 11 and teaching difficult subjects.
In addition to hosting a page of teacher-created lesson plans, the blog will stream a one-hour documentary on September 11, with links to four additional films by online film outfit SnagLearning. Schulten and Epstein Ojalvo will also craft a Teaching Topics page connected to the ’ resources, which include a newly formatted “Portraits of Grief” (vignettes of the tragedy’s victims), archived front pages from the first 10 days after the attacks, and links to more than 12,000 pages of oral history. Images will include an infographic on how the World Trade Center towers were constructed and photos of relics. Related lesson plans by the Learning Network include one on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which poses questions such as “What is terrorism?” and “Can democracy be imposed on another country?”
Epstein Ojalvo, who was teaching at Stuyvesant High School near Ground Zero on September 11, may also post about her own experience. As the advisor for the , the school newspaper, she helped her students publish their first-person accounts of the attack in a special edition archived on Scribd.
“What seems to be emerging is this could be a whole-year class on the philosophic, social, and religious questions from one side,” says Schulten. “On the other hand, we hear that [teachers] want kids to have a sense of the human impact. They want to find some way for kids to realize how 9/11 felt for them and how it continues to reverberate.”
