“Do you know what a tower is?” The Crisis of 9/11 Remembrance Pedagogy in Samira Makhmalbaf’s God, Construction and Destruction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt (2004), “difficult knowledge” “signif[ies] the relations between representations of social trauma in curriculum and the individual's encounters with them in pedagogy” (p. 354). Difficult knowledge thus poses a twofold crisis for and of education. The remembrance of historical trauma is a crisis for education, since teaching and learning about such events are necessary when addressing their myriad legacies. It is also a crisis of education because the practices of teaching about and learning from traumatic experiences are themselves constituted by the events that education represents through pedagogy and curriculum. This paper takes up Britzman’s concept of “difficult knowledge” as it is embodied in the film God, Construction and Destruction. In particular, the paper unpacks the concept of difficult knowledge as it relates to the film’s aim of making 9/11 remembrance pedagogy more ethically accountable. This paper argues that the film’s portrayal of a “failed” lesson on 9/11 demonstrates how “strategic memorial practices” (Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, 2000, p. 3) risk equating 9/11 remembrance pedagogy with hegemonic and nationalist forms of remembrance that foreclose the crises that difficult knowledge otherwise poses. In its investigation into the futures of 9/11 remembrance pedagogy, the paper addresses three issues that preoccupy Makhmalbaf’s film: distinguishing between “learning from” versus “learning about” traumatic events; historicizing and contextualizing historical trauma; and lastly, assessing the significance of art and artists in education and public remembrance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".