Shadows of the past historical interpretation, propaganda, and the story of ender wiggin

Popular science fiction provides classroom teachers multiple rich opportunities to adopt a critical lens in examining the ways in which governments and their people interact. Given the highly contested nature of both the social and natural sciences presently in the schools - particularly because of the ways in which these subject areas impact the political arena at the local, regional, and national levels - these serve as excellent fora in which to use popular science fiction to teach about and around socioscientific issues (SSI) and controversial public issues (CPI). In this chapter, we examine specifically the ways in which popular science fiction-Orson Scott Cards (1985/1994) Enders Game in particular is useful in teaching students how to identify propaganda, to discern whose purposes it serves, and to question how what it includes and what it excludes works toward those purposes.