Teaching in a time of war.

On Wednesday, November 4, 2004, the Center for the Improvement of Teaching (CIT) at the University of Massachusetts--Boston held one of a regularly scheduled series of open forums on teaching. The event was planned weeks in advance. Speakers volunteered to participate, a room was reserved, and announcements were posted. There was nothing unusual about this event, not even its timely topic or the fact that this event had to be rescheduled several times over because space is tight at this over-extended, urban, commuter campus.

But the coincidence of rescheduling did make a difference, as this Forum ended up taking place on the day after the United States' 2004 presidential election which gave four more years to George W. Bush and a war-mongering, conservative "right." The sense of gloom that pervaded our campus that day was palpable. Students seemed subdued and tired; faculty reported that they couldn't quite trust themselves to teach with the expected appearance of dispassion, let alone cheer. But as students, faculty, and staff members from across the college gathered for this event, filling the modest conference room beyond capacity, it became clear that this was not just another Forum.

Not coincidentally, our topic was "Teaching in Time of War," and though CIT had sponsored similar Forums previously, this particular one got its impetus from Radical Teacher's work on the present cluster of articles, since the CIT Director happened to know about it. However, on that particular November day--when the man who led us into Iraq had just been given a second term; when the numbers of dead and wounded were mounting on all sides; when stories of prisoners' torture and abuse were being litigated in courts; and when the U.S. was just about to start a major incursion into Fallujah--this discussion had the feel of a teach-in. Our focus was on pedagogy, but the urgency of our subject matter, including its impact in the classroom, were foremost in our minds.

The tension of the students and faculty crowding into that room, the exchange of greetings and knowing glances, and the urgency evident when anyone spoke were clearly not business as usual. We may not have registered it that afternoon, but in retrospect it is evident that we needed to be together so as to define ourselves as a community and affirm, together, our conviction that education matters, that speaking out is necessary, and that the current fighting the United States is engaged in must be resisted. We came to that discussion from different fields and with different kinds of expertise, but with a shared sense that our very humanity is being challenged by this last election, and that our task is to resist and overcome this challenge through commitment to an education that does not segregate knowledge from what happens in the world around us.

The interdisciplinary panel opened with a fiery talk by Paul Atwood from American Studies and UMass/Boston's Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences; his remarks are expanded in this issue. Linda Dittmar from the English Department discussed her course "Literature and the Political Imagination," a recent version of which had focused on fiction concerning the consequences of imperialism, with an emphasis on the Middle East. A second panelist from the English Department, Sandra Howland, laid out the benefits and tensions involved in centering a freshman writing course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ruth Miller, from the History Department, talked about the need for factual precision in discussions of Middle East history and current politics. The panel presentations concluded with sociologist Emmet Schaefer, whose discussion of a unit in his sociology course on the "relocation" of Japanese-Americans during World War II, helped remind us that issues of "homeland" anxieties and racism toward supposedly enemy "others" are hardly new to this country.

The audience included faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from Political Science, American Studies, Sociology, English, History, Women's Studies, Philosophy and a lot more, from the Army captain and new mother just back from Iraq and now working on a M.A. in English to a freshman student worried about a reinstatement of the draft to faculty wondering how to teach about war in a time of war truthfully and without alienating their students. Some expressed similar concerns to those articulated in this issue of Radical Teacher by Sandra Young, who, in teaching an advanced composition class about 9/11 and its aftermath, hadn't fully realized its "potentially divisive" nature. Her comment that "the teacher's responsibility is to create an environment where students feel safe to take risks" was echoed at this event by Howland's discussion of the challenge of using the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as an organizing thematic focus for her freshman writing course.

With one exception (Atwood's "Teaching About War in a Time of War") the essays published in this issue of Radical Teacher did not emerge from this Forum, though they echo its concerns. The teaching experiences discussed here are representative of what many students and educators are thinking about at this historic juncture. The sense of political and moral outrage and educational urgency that were circulating in that cramped conference room at UMass/Boston on November 4th, 2004, are ones many others share in the present political climate. This awareness informed our editorial work as we were preparing this cluster of articles.

Though the emphasis of the following articles is on specific teaching situations, a general question which emerged during both the Forum and Radical Teacher's editorial discussions concerned our decision to title this cluster "Teaching in Time of War" rather than "Peace Studies." In part, this debate concerns the need to present ways of thinking that will counter the currently prevailing emphasis on war, including the present fervor of jingoist patriotism and its bloody consequences. The fact that three of the following essays address questions of media (Spence, Young, and Vogt) and two more concern the construction of ideological consensus (Atwood and [something]) speaks to that. The underlying assumption in all these essays is that a critique of the rhetoric and modes of thought that construct acceptance of war is necessary to its dismantling. As Atwood comments in his article: "most of what too many young people think they know about the wars of the nation's past is really myth; effectively 'Disneyfied' fantasies learned in the service of a national ideology asserting that warfare is an aberration in the American experience, and that the U.S. goes to war only when enemies (or 'evildoers' to use the current catchphrase) leave no other choice." What is ultimately at issue is peace, of course, not war.

A related and perhaps more intractable problem stirred up by our title concerns its claim that we are, currently, teaching in a time of war. This wording presupposes also its opposite--that there are times, perhaps long stretches, when our teaching occurs during times of peace. In this respect our title includes two contradictory yet equally compelling truths: that we are living in exceptional times, and yet that it's just more of the same. On the one hand we, as teachers, find ourselves responding to the after shocks of a particular round of violence, but we also do so in relation to contexts of long duration in which current crises are embedded. Indeed, the present round of violence which has us reeling is hardly one and indivisible. The fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel/Palestine (with potential extensions into Iran, Syria, Kurdistan, and Central Asia) may seem like a single regional war--a war for oil, a clash of civilizations, a war on Islam, and so on. But when viewed through a wider lens, at issue are considerations of empire that commit us to an ongoing "time of war" even when it slips under our radar, eludes congress, and is misperceived by the media.

The question that arises is, then, What kind of activities constitute a "war" when no war has been officially declared? Is the nebulous, though enthusiastically proclaimed, "war on terrorism" a war? Is it in fact "war" when fighting is conducted without political acknowledgement, debate, and due sanction? Is it a "war" when it occurs without a clear territorial location? And how are we to manage when the media obfuscates our access to knowledge and judgment? As our history in Vietnam, Central and Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere has been showing us over just the last few decades, the notions of "engagement" and "war" are artifacts of discourse that manipulate and often obscure the simple fact that violent means are undertaken by one group against another for the sake of territory, property, religion, and other kinds of dominance and power.

In various ways contributions to this cluster are informed by these questions. Not surprisingly, in various ways they all concern the manipulation of language by the government, the media and, therefore, the public at large to create a sense of exceptional urgency that is implicitly contrasted with benign normalcy. Vogt comments in his article on the fact that "in the week before and after the war started, CBS, NBC, and PBS conducted 393 interviews which were pro-war and only three interviews that were anti-war." His course--the writing component of a course-cluster called "Truth, Lies, and Videotape"--introduced students to alternative media sources as a means to demystifying publicly available sources of information and, in this way, reaching a more complex understanding of the United States' engagements. Spence and Young's respective discussions of their media and writing courses do likewise, as does Bigelow when he writes the following: "Teachers need to engage our students in a deep critical reading of terms--such as "terrorism," "patriotism," and "our way of life"--that evoke vivid images but can be used for ambiguous ends." Indeed, as all the following articles suggest, since September 2001 the challenge of reading the systematic misuse of language and other modes of media representation against the grain has been particularly important for progressive educators.

At issue in this reading against the grain is not just the existence of rhetoric in itself, for rhetoric is probably as old as human speech. Rather, at issue are the political, economic, military, and civil rights circumstances that are entangled in what is called "war" at the present moment. Torture and incarceration without due process, the draconian measures of Homeland Security, the devastation of Iraq and other countries, the incipience of civil wars, and the specter of other possible assaults on other "evil regimes" are all instances of the complexities entangled in this usage. They are also instances of what we refer to above as "contexts of long duration in which the present crisis is embedded." Though the United States government defines its currently declared war as a specifically targeted combat that is therefore limited in scope, topography, and duration, the reality is that this activity participates in a long trajectory of imperialist warfare. Atwood points this out most explicitly in his discussion of teaching "War in American Culture": "[In this course] we examine numerous cultural productions from different eras and perspectives--essays, stories, poems, films, novels, political cartoons--and begin with the central question, 'Is the United States an inherently peace-loving nation that goes to war only when others leave no option; or is war the American way of life?'"

Thus, while Vogt, Young, and Spence discuss the crisis triggered by 9/11 as a new challenge for their teaching, Atwood reminds us of ways this new development is embedded in a historical trajectory where "the war on terror" is not a new war. Rather, it is a strand within an ongoing war the U.S. has been waging to expand its hegemony within a Western imperial thrust that is currently undergoing reconfiguration in global contexts. (1) A portion of this ongoing war has been called "The Cold War," though hot wars were fought at the margins of the "cold" one all along. (2) Some of it has been sustained by Marines and other uniformed combatants posted to non-combat duty abroad, by "advisors" and by other undercover agents who do not participate in combat directly though the indirect effects of their presence are at times military in nature. Part of our fighting has been leveraged through CIA interventions that overturned governments while leaving the United States Congress under-informed and misinformed, voters unaware of weapons used, deals struck, and lives lost. (3) At issue, then, are not only literal wars but also proxy wars and virtual wars--wars about which the public knows next to nothing. As this discussion suggests, the very concept of "war" becomes slippery when extended beyond fighting between nations or states: the fighting involved in the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on crime, and a range of civil wars, uprisings, and gang violence have all been called "war" at one time or another.

The present cluster of articles focuses on current states of warfare, declared or undeclared, its ramifications extending from the present moment backwards and forwards. In this connection, it is useful to invoke again Bruce Franklin's essay concerning teaching the literature of the Vietnam War, which notes students' hunger to learn about that war and about the revolutionary forces which defined our culture--especially its youth culture-at the time. (4) Other instructors confirm Franklin's report, at least regarding those pockets of American society where young people feel that they have "inherited" that war from parents, relatives, and neighbors who lived through it. In our own literature classes ("us" being this duster's editors, Pamela Annas and Linda Dittmar) the anti-Vietnam war poetry of Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Bruce Weigl, for example, the fiction of Tim O'Brien, and films which emerged out of this war never lose their hold.

Not only the body count but also the mass demonstrations, the haunting sense of lasting disabilities, and a profound sense of disaffection, grief, and anger so many Americans experienced in relation to that war, the Vietnam War, together with other states of warfare, have revolutionized our thinking. Over the last thirty years we've been through the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, the invasions of Panama and Granada, the hostage crisis in Iran, a failed incursion in Somalia, the toppling of Allende in Chile, CIA incursions elsewhere in Latin America, the new Balkan War, two wars in the middle east (not counting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq), and myriad acts of unofficial violence initiated by us and/or directed by us globally. Internally, the United States has undergone radical erosion of trust in government, democracy, and civic responsibility. Externally, it has acquired an unprecedented and dangerous sense of its own power.

Such developments invite a new and unflinching understanding of global politics and, alongside it, a critical scrutiny of ways that understanding is constructed. It is therefore not a coincidence that the present articles focus on teaching that addresses the relations among media, culture, discourse, and ideology. They focus on contingencies educators face regarding what many experience as a frighteningly inchoate present and future. These contingencies involve basic matters: fear for one's self (fear of terrorism, fear of the draft, fear of combat) but also racism and paranoia towards others. They involve confusion born of profound ignorance about causes and effects; about being victims but also being perpetrators; about the meaning of "heroism," "patriotism," "democracy," and "freedom"; about honesty and lies; about the manipulation of mass ideology and the value of independent thinking; about ideals and the abuse of ideals. Clearly the United States' newly discovered sense of its vulnerability as well as its power has been creating new challenges in the classroom.

The articles included in this cluster tell a complex story of ignorance, bewilderment, avoidance, and fear. In these instances, and many others where teachers attempted to respond to the trauma of 9/11 and the fighting into which the United States has propelled itself since then, the challenge is not just to find ways to assimilate the legacy of a traumatic past but to find ways to respond to present and anticipated violence. At issue for teachers in particular is the need to legitimize critical inquiry into the nature, effects, and moral validity of warfare as a national (for the United States) and global imperial undertaking. Given the enormity of such concerns, one of the main challenges for teachers is finding ways to make the classroom a supportive space to pursue such concerns, and to do so without infringement on their own academic freedoms. The familiar old concerns are still there. We need to "support our troops" and to "bring our men and women [a.k.a. 'boys'] back home." But we also have larger questions about "what are we doing over there," what implications our actions have for our supposed commitment to human rights, how this "war" is fought on the level of the home front, and what future we are helping shape for the world at large.

Neither the Oklahoma bombing (a grotesque aberration of home-grown notions of "freedom") nor the earlier failed attempt to bomb the World Trade Center prepared our students or the public at large for the trauma of 9/11 and its after shocks. This unprecedented (for the United States) attack on a huge number of innocent civilians, literally coming "out of the blue" and projected over and again on television screens, played out like futuristic catastrophe-film footage awash with quasi-biblical doomsday predictions. The response of shock and incomprehension, by the U.S. government, the media, and the public, resulted in specific problems in classrooms across the country. They caused immense cognitive dislocation regarding what so many Americans, and especially young people, perceive as their power and safety.

Further, this loss of grounding has occurred within a national culture that welcomes the fog of amnesia and resists awareness even when the public's need for understanding, and especially young people's need, is most pressing. Lack of comprehension easily translates into an illusion of incomprehensibility. As Spence points out in her article about teaching a Media Studies class on representations of the Holocaust and 9/11, while her students could manage the more historically "closed" Holocaust, they saw 9/11 as an event without meaning. "Because they could not find or impose a satisfactory back-story that would account for the causes of the attack, and because they could not yet imagine the closure needed for coherence and unity, they were powerless to create a significant, meaningful 9/11 narrative." This incapacitating failure to imagine closure and produce coherence taps into a tangle of concerns ranging from simple fear at the prospect of mass civilian deaths to a complicated atmosphere of paranoia toward suspicious "others"--notably Moslems (popularly conflated with "Arabs") and people of color who happen to resemble them.

In this climate of distrust, much touted principles of diversity and inclusion turned out to have their limits, and hallowed principles of free inquiry and speech face silencing. Tolerance, freedom, and equality now seem luxuries, ideals of social well-being about which the United States can preen and congratulate itself only when it feels safe. We might do well to consider the poems included in this issue by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad All and Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai which, in the midst of conflict yet to be resolved, can imagine the end of war and the beginning of community.

NOTES

(1.) Tony Judt's "Dreams of Empire" provides a useful overview of this trajectory. New York Review of Books, 4 Nov. 2004: 38-41.

(2.) Eric Hobsbaum, "Cold War." The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994): 225-256.

(3.) E.g. the U.S. intervention in Iran's internal politics in the 1950s, its intervention in Chile in the 1970s, and most recently its covert interventions in Venezuelan and Ukrainian elections.

(4.) H. Bruce Franklin, "Can Vietnam Awaken Us Again?" Radical Teacher 66.28-31.