Teaching 9/11: Lessons from Classrooms in the United States and Pakistan

In this essay, I discuss my experience of teaching a course on 9/11 at several universities in the United States and at one in Pakistan. The essay emphasizes the importance of teaching this course to critically engage students with policies that have followed the event and with how they have had an impact on people in the United States and abroad. The experience of teaching the class, especially in the United States, showed mixed results. While initially administrators welcomed the idea of teaching this topic, partially due to some students' complaints I was never asked to teach the course again. Another interesting finding is that although Pakistani students had greater awareness of the impact of U.S. policies after 9/11, the language of security and terror has managed to become global. In the essay that follows, I discuss this experience at its different stages.