Facing Nuclear Facts--and Fears--in the Classroom

When the nuclear holocaust movie “The Day After” aired on television two years ago, Los Angeles school board member Jackie Goldberg’s telephone was flooded with calls from teachers.

“They all wanted to know if the district had a policy,” she said. “Could they assign (watching the film) to their students? Should they discuss it in class? How should they deal with their students’ fears?”

After making a few calls, Goldberg found that the board of education had no guidelines for teachers who wanted to discuss nuclear issues with their pupils. “We really had nothing to give teachers any guidance on how to handle a subject that is at once political, scientific, emotional and a lot of other things.”

Goldberg decided the district should offer teachers some help and so last year introduced a board resolution calling for the development of a curriculum for teachers who want to teach about such things as nuclear energy and nuclear war.

The board quickly passed the resolution, asking the district’s Office of Instruction to prepare academic materials and lesson plans. But Goldberg and the board felt that academics alone were insufficient, given the fears students and teachers had expressed about living in the Nuclear Age.

Members of the Thursday Night Group, a local nuclear education organization, agreed that an emotional component was essential for the new curriculum and volunteered to help. The group, which has among its members many therapists and educators, had developed workshops to help adults and children deal with their feelings about nuclear issues and had presented the workshops many times to teachers.

Since the Thursday Night Group had spent five years developing these techniques, said Lynn Greenberg, a Santa Monica psychotherapist and the group’s executive director, “it seemed appropriate that we should offer these skills to enhance the program the district is creating.”

Realizing it couldn’t give enough workshops to train all Los Angeles teachers, the Thursday Night Group, in conjunction with the district, decided to videotape a teacher workshop and a classroom discussion with students. The tapes, now nearly finished, will--if approved by the school board, as is expected--be used as a supplemental tool by the district in a series of workshops for teachers who want to learn how to use the new curriculum.

The videos are both titled “Dealing With Feelings Regarding Nuclear Issues.” Part 1 is subtitled “A Workshop for Educators and Parents”; Part 2, “A Classroom Demonstration.”

“The tapes are designed to give teachers some understanding of the kinds of emotions that arise in themselves and their students around the nuclear issue,” Greenberg said. “They will also provide teachers with some tools for dealing with these emotions so they don’t interfere with effective education.”

Essential Component

Board member Goldberg thinks the tapes will provide an essential component of the curriculum. “These issues are not easy things to contemplate,” she said. “The most typical response of all of us, including teachers, is ‘I don’t want to think about it.’ ”

Indeed, during the teacher workshop taped by the Thursday Night Group, district teachers expressed many fears. First, teachers were asked to write down an image, feeling, thought or picture that came to mind when they heard the words Nuclear Age.

While some of the responses were hopeful--one teacher wrote down the words “positive potential”--many expressed fears. A number visualized a mushroom cloud when they heard the words. Others expressed a sense of powerlessness. One woman, whose family in Poland had recently been exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident, felt frustrated that “this just happened to us without our knowledge and there’s nothing we can do.”

Unblocking Education

Greenberg explained to teachers why it is important to understand such feelings. “With the Nuclear Age come lots of images of fear, hopelessness and destruction. These feelings, if they are repressed, will block teachers from being willing to teach and students from being able or willing to learn about all the various aspects of the nuclear issue.”

Teachers at the workshop also expressed fears about how to best communicate with their students about nuclear issues. “You can teach the children pros and cons, but they have a tendency to focus on the cons,” one teacher said. “How far should we go?” Another expressed doubts about his ability to teach the issues effectively. “I don’t have the experience to answer some of their questions because I’m not an expert,” he said.

Greenberg believes that by examining their own concerns, teachers will be better able to understand what the students are feeling. “Kids and adults experience many of the same feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and powerlessness,” she said. “But the students have fewer psychological defenses to deal with these feelings. They tend to be more aware of their feelings that the world may end.”

Voicing Shared Fears

A session the Thursday Night Group taped with junior high school students illustrated that teachers and students share many of the same fears. When asked, as the teachers had been, what the words Nuclear Age brought to mind, a number of students pictured mushroom clouds. They visualized crying people, darkness and starvation, emptiness and pain.

The students, like their teachers, also felt a strong sense of helplessness. “I feel like a puppet,” one intense blond girl with glasses said. “If we launch a bomb on Russia, who are we going to hit but innocent people? It doesn’t make sense.”

Greenberg believes that only after exploring such feelings can people move beyond them and examine without bias the positive aspects of the Nuclear Age, such as nuclear medicine, nuclear agriculture and space exploration.

To help students and teachers work through their fears, the Thursday Night Group has developed what it calls the SAFE model. The formula calls for people to share their feelings, accept those feelings, find out the facts about nuclear issues, formulate opinions and function and encourage themselves and others to act.

“It is only through action that we are going to be able to resolve the nuclear dangers that threaten our planet,” said Greenberg. “Also, when people take action, their feelings of helplessness diminish. We feel better when we are involved in creating our futures.”

Balanced Materials

Goldberg and the board are pleased with what they have seen of the educational component of the curriculum. “I wanted to make sure we addressed the emotional issues and also that we presented a very balanced academic curriculum,” Goldberg said. “I think we have. I wanted to make sure that we had materials that talked about all sides, materials that said ‘Star Wars’ (the Strategic Defense Initiative) is great and that ‘Star Wars’ is awful; materials that say nuclear power plants are safe and materials that say there is no such thing as a safe nuclear plant.”

In assembling the academic part of the curriculum, the district drew from diverse sources including the Department of Defense, the Air Force, the U.S. State Department, Educators for Social Responsibility and Strike for Peace.

Allan Scholl, one of the district curriculum specialists who designed the curriculum, said the nuclear education package is a series of lesson plans and extensive resource materials for teachers from kindergarten through grade 12. “This is not something teachers have to use,” Scholl said. “It is to be used by teachers as they feel they would like to use it and as it is appropriate.”

Scholl said the lesson plans are tied to existing curricula. For example, the district currently mandates that sixth-grade students should learn to gather research information. A suggested Nuclear Age lesson plan for sixth-graders therefore emphasizes information gathering, having students put together a bulletin board of information gathered from many different sources on nuclear power.

Bombing of Hiroshima

Students in 11th-grade study history, so one suggested nuclear lesson for them involves examining what happened at Hiroshima. Kindergartners, who are not yet interested in or ready for learning about nuclear war, might have lessons dealing with generalized fears. Other suggestions for younger students include units on conflict resolution and good citizenship.

“We’re not trying to tell students how to think,” Scholl said. “We’re just saying students need to know something so they can make informed decisions.”

Goldberg noted that the new curriculum is an official recognition on the district’s part that nuclear issues are an important part of education. “Most teachers are already teaching something about the Nuclear Age. This gives them a resource to draw from so they don’t have to dig out everything themselves.”