“No One Should See What They Have to Do”: Military Children and Media Representations of War

Abstract

The primary objective of this article is to describe how the children of soldiers critiqued and examined media representations of war. Taken from a more extensive qualitative case study involving eight teachers, this article examines one social studies teacher and her students’ perspectives on media coverage of war through two Socratic Seminar discussions focused on two wars: the American Civil War and Gulf War. Data was collected through interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations. Students leveled a specific set of critiques at television media and those who consume it. They also grappled with two ethical quandaries: censorship and the justness of war. This article emerged from an unusual place – a Mathew Brady photograph. The teacher, a lecturer typically, decided to engage her students in discussion. This discussion was designed to provide “process and sense-making time,” according to their teacher, Ms. Jones, after four days of lecture on the American Civil War. Yet, the discussion grew into something much different than Ms. Jones's original plan. It evolved into an interrogation of how the media represents war. Inspired by the thoughtful discussion, several months later, Ms. Jones engaged the same students in an examination of media representations of the first Gulf War. Ms. Jones is the focus of this article because out of the eight other teachers in the larger qualitative study, she was the only one to focus on classroom time (two entire class sessions) on media representations of war.

“My People Wouldn’t Stand For This”: Ethnic Studies as Critical Civic Education

“…This was a common realization noted by all three teachers, in their passion to tell the truth, to present a more authentic and difficult history they had overlooked the necessity of clearly, specifically, and intentionally teaching the resistance (Gibbs, 2020a;Gibbs & Hilburn, 2021;Levy & Sheppard, 2018;Zembylas, 2014). Rather than just a wave of destruction, students began to see the fierce resistance, the decades of struggle, the successes, and the regroupings when failure struck.…”

“…This recognition opens possibilities for civics including a critical civic literacy (Gibbs, 2019;DeVitis, 2011) and critical civic agency (Gillen, 2015;Ross, 2016). These grow student critical consciousness (Apple, 2014;Gibbs & Hilburn, 2021;J. Duncan-Andrade, 2007) and the ability for students to engage in acts of change for themselves, their community and the larger society (Martell & Stevens, 2020).…”

We Should Know Everything Shouldn’t We?: Children of Soldiers on What and How War Should Be Taught

“…Recently scholars have examined how the high school history standards of the United States and the country of Vietnam describe how the Vietnam War should be taught (Lancaster & Hilburn, 2023). Other scholarship has examined the experience of teachers teaching war (Gibbs, 2019), the pedagogy they engage (Gibbs, 2020a(Gibbs, , 2020bGibbs & Hilburn, 2020) and the experiences of students examining how students responded to a unit of instruction focusing on anti-war movements (Gibbs, 2021(Gibbs, , 2023. This research has revealed that teachers generally feel unprepared engaging in teaching a more authentic and complicated version of war particularly in ideologically conservative school communities.…”