Worlds of Terrorism: Learning through Young Adult Literature

We are presented daily with news about terrorism-our "war" on it, acts of it around the world, talk about levels of alert with a color code to help us recognize how fearful we should be. Concurrent with the writing of this manuscript, Yahoo News alone reflected this presence in our lives: The 9/11 Panel decided we were unprepared for the attack. Osama bin Laden is still alive and sending messages via videotape asking us to recognize the errors of our President and join in a truce; our Vice President says we can only destroy terrorists. New York continues to live with threats about subway security. Kidnappers hold Christian peace activists and journalists hostage in Iraq. Australia receives a threat of terrorism. oil workers are kidnapped in Nigeria. The December 12, 2005, issue of Newsweek reports that women are becoming increasingly active as terrorists and are able to hide explosives while appearing innocently pregnant. A cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammed with a bomb on his head set off new acts of violence around the world. As this article goes to press, Al Queda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has just been killed by US forces, and Al Queda threatens retaliation and renewed efforts in the insurgency.

While talk of terrorism, kidnapping, hijacking, bombings and bioterrorism are not pleasant, 9/11 brought these words into a U.S. American consciousness, now as a reality and as a possibility for repetition. Yet even as the news media sustains the focus, people in general continue to live within a more immediate world of work, family, socializing or otherwise surviving. Doris Lessing writes that "[e]very one of us is pan of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself. These are hard to examine ..." (33). Along with other teachers and authors, I believe we have a responsibility to help students better understand the world in which they live by facilitating an examination of, or inquiry into, topics that confuse, create fear, raise questions and baffle world leaders.

Following the 9/11 event, then editor of The ALAN Journal, Pamela Sissi Carroll, shared what many felt as helplessness in reassuring students through young adult literature that their lives remain safe and secure. She called on us to "Look for significance in the ways we live and the lives we touch. For many of us, that means continuing to reach out to adolescents through the medium of young adult books" (3). Author Jennifer Armstrong noted two years later that while "in the world of children's literature, we are pretty cozy. . . .out there in the rest of the world, things are going to hell" (191). She asks what our books are doing to work against such chaos and fear. She writes that books can be the "enemy of violent zealotry" and "give us access to multiple points of view" (192). Kenneth Lindblom, a column editor of the English Journal, suggests that we recognize a responsibility to prepare students for a better future and to take the 9/11 Commission Report's critique of a lack of imagination in our intelligence agencies as an opportunity to promote imaginative conversation, thinking and action in our classrooms. Ruth Caillouet, assistant professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University, finds the current war in Iraq a "teachable moment" (68), a way for good teachers to integrate the adolescent search for identity with the complexity of world problems as another kind of identity searching. She frames the time of adolescence as a war-of emotions and hormones, angst and uncertainty, and definitely fear.

I was involved in a research project in an 8th grade English classroom when 9/11 happened. Teachers were understandably unsure how to discuss this horrendous event that continued to unfold and replay on television sets in every classroom. Some decided that students were too young to talk about it. Others attempted to let students talk, write, question and process what they were feeling as we all tried to absorb the shock of this attack. I noted that whenever class was not officially in session, students wanted to talk and were asking questions that merited a response or school time to investigate their concerns. But within a few days, classroom television sets returned to playing Channel One for ten minutes each morning and any mention of the national tragedy rarely surfaced anywhere throughout the day.

Ramifications of Terrorism for Young Adults

As time passed following the 9/11 tragedy, I became increasingly interested in a pervasive silence I was finding in schools about the event and the topic of terrorism. In visits to middle and high school classrooms to supervise pre-service teachers, I sensed the unspoken desire to return to "normalcy," putting any talk about terrorism, possibility of war, and eventually the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan on a "not on class time" unofficial policy. Students seemed to comply, returning to comfortable school procedures and topics, appearing to forget that 9/11 ever happened unless something reminded them enough to make a reference in passing. With more time and the extended war in Iraq, the silence became more noticeable as the political climate of our nation turned into an emotionally challenging and polarized arena that usually valued a Blue or Red stance rather than any attempt to dialogue. I found social studies classrooms to be the only school location for occasional but surface discussion or questioning of war and terrorism as connections were made between history and present.