A Balancing Act: Interpreting Tragedy at the 9/11 Memorial Museum

ABSTRACT

The 9/11 Memorial Museum’s docent program offers visitors artifact-based entry-points into a difficult, emotional history. The program’s launch raised a host of questions, many centered on how to balance and convey strongly held, often traumatic, and sometimes conflicting experiences with a newly constructed institutional narrative. This article examines how the museum negotiated specific issues, as well as ongoing questions and challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• 9/11 Memorial Museum
• education program
• docents
• interpreting difficult history
• lived experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Noah Rauch is the Senior Vice President for Education & Public Programs at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, where he oversees the Museum’s educational, interpretive, public, and civic training programs. Rauch was a senior member of the team that conceived, planned, and implemented the inaugural education and interpretive programming for the institution, including student workshops, teacher professional development sessions, the Museum Ambassador afterschool program, age-appropriate programs for younger audiences, guided tours, and a volunteer docent program. Previously, he managed grants for the Center for Informal Learning and Schools at the Exploratorium, and worked in the education departments at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He received an Ed.M. in Arts-in-Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in American Studies from Wesleyan University.

Notes

1. In our school and family programming, we extend this theme to first responders and helpers in our audience’s own communities.

2. In this sense, the program has served as a microcosm of the larger development process for the 9/11 Memorial Museum which negotiated similar issues on a much larger scale.

3. We initially underestimated how particular and engrained our language was at the institution. We used certain words and phrases often because there was extensive internal research supporting their usage. After years, their use had become almost invisible.

4. Mistaken memories are not confined to the docent corps. I distinctly remember seeing the Last Column in a visit to Hangar 17 at JFK Airport shortly after I began working at the Museum in 2010. However, the artifact had been removed from the hangar a year earlier, in 2009. Memory is fallible; memory is malleable.

5. See Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. See also Hirst et al., “Long-Term Memory,” 161–76.