The study uses qualitative research methods to investigate how Canadian youth construct collective memory in relation to the War on Terror, and deals with the memories and understandings of 99 university students. I find that the landscape of collective memory is both material and social in its composition because it involves not only a human agent who remembers but also a collectivity of significant 'others' and material technologies of memory. The study concludes that significant, complex, uneven and mutually constitutive relationships between these features result in the construction of multiple and contested collective memories within a single compass.This study is a part of a growing body of work exploring the internal dynamics of collective memories that make them, 'dynamic, interactive, and therefore potentially changing, in fluxcontested' (Kuhn, 2010: 299), and 'more than just a personal act' (Misztal, 2003: 6). The idea of mapping the landscape of collective memory in relation to the War on Terror occurred to me in 2007 when I saw a group of people near the Highway of Heroes, CFB Trenton, Ontario. They were collectively remembering the Canadian soldiers who died in Afghanistan and producing a commemorative narrative (Zerubavel, 1995) through acts of commemoration. They were involved in the construction of collective memory by collectively grieving the deaths of unknown soldiers and sharing a common narrative of the war that account for this remembrance. People gather over the bridge above the Highway, whenever the military convoy with soldiers' bodies passes by, and mark the site with Canadian flags in their hands (Burnett, 2008). Practices like this link individuals through collective remembering that involves a commonly shared past. My concern was not their practices but the factors involved in the construction of a commonly shared past (Kuhn, 2010) or the formation of collective memories of the war in this case.This article attempts to understand the internal dynamics of collective memory by exploring how Canadian youth construct collective memories in relation to the War on Terror. It deals with Memory Studies 5(4) 378-391

This article examines the ways in which young Canadians represent the 'the War on Terror' in their narratives. I explore how a hegemonic nationalist narrative enters into this representation in different ways and positions itself in a dynamic tension with the USA, at times eliding the difference and at times affirming it. I illustrate that these students do not simply tell the narrative of the war, but use the deixis of 'we/us/our' or 'them/they/their' in a way that constructs multiple imagined communities. I argue that these presumably benign representations of Canadian involvement in the war produce banal nationalism that excludes 'others', and binds human imagination into a framework that works against critical thinking.

This multimethod study is based on written narratives, demographic questionnaires, and interviews. I examine data collected from 99 students of a Canadian university to explore how the War on Terror has affected them. The findings are divided into four categories. The first category of the respondents is mute about the war's effects. The second shows a disjuncture between the respondents' lives and the war. The third reflects the effects on the Canadian soldiers' friends or relatives, and the final represents those who do not have personal connections to the war but feel deeply affected by it. The discourse of fear appears as the most prominent effect in the narratives of the respondents. The basic themes that emerged from the discourse of fear (racism, Islamophobia, and social control) are then developed and discussed as they pertain to the respondents. The findings have many implications for both researchers and educators.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the relationships between students' conceptual knowledge, collective narratives, teaching and learning. The study was based on empirical data generated from ninety-nine narratives, four interviews, and demographic questionnaires. The findings highlighted that collective narratives reflect the narrative arcs that encompass the patterns of students' thinking. Collective narratives can be used to assess the organization of students' prior knowledge maps regarding any subject due to their specific internal structures. The author argued that the collective narratives of students create a collaborative landscape of teaching and learning where students' prior knowledge combined with academic knowledge can be imparted in a systematic way. The study concluded that students' collective narratives offer teachers the benefit of using students' texts as alternative thinking devices in constructing knowledge.

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