Teachers' workshop enhances awareness of Chornobyl (07/25/99)

Teachers' workshop enhances awareness of Chornobyl

by Jennifer Ryan
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

MADISON, Wisc. - The idea of cross-curriculum teaching recently has received much publicity in educational circles. However, finding a topic equally compelling in science and social studies classrooms is another issue.

Bringing together teachers, professors and social activists who more often talk at each other than with one another, a workshop titled "Chornobyl: A Theme to Integrate the Natural and Social Sciences" took place recently at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin.

Held on June 28-July 2, the interdisciplinary workshop was hosted by the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA), the Wisconsin Teacher Enhancement Program in Biology, and the charitable organization Friends of Chornobyl Centers, United States. The three groups together designed the course to illustrate how issues of science and technology are inevitably into woven into a political, economic and cultural context.

Dr. David Marples, a historian at the University of Alberta in Canada who is an expert on the Chornobyl accident, gave the keynote address on the "Politics of Chornobyl" on the morning of June 28.

Dr. Marples reminded listeners that the 1986 accident could easily be ignored by average Americans as something long past, while in actuality its aftereffects continue. "The idea that the sarcophagus [the shell encasing reactor No. 4] will last 'for eternity' is absurd," he noted.

Another lingering question, said Dr. Marples, concerns the fate of the liquidators, those firefighters and mine workers who, conscripted into service after the accident, were initially praised as heroes, then were quickly forgotten.

During the first three days of the conference, University of Wisconsin professors in political science, medicine, nuclear energy, social work, history and literature examined the multi-faceted consequences of the world's worst nuclear accident.

In his talk on "Environmental Devastation and Communism," Mark Beissinger, a professor of political science at the UW-Madison and the former director of the CREECA, noted that the disaster at the Chornobyl plant was not an isolated event, but a consequence of Soviet industrial culture.

"Chornobyl was not merely an accident, but rather emerged from rules established by the Stalinist industrial system. Through its reward of growth at any cost, that industrial system fostered a culture of irresponsibility toward safety and the environment," he noted. The lessons of Chornobyl, Prof. Beissinger concluded, are not simply how to design safer nuclear plants, but how to create a larger culture of responsibility toward human life and the environment.

Another highlight of the workshop was a concert given on June 29 by the Russian Folk Orchestra of the UW-Madison, joined by guest vocalist Galina Nenasheva. The musicians performed traditional and popular Russian and Ukrainian music to a packed house at the university's student union.

The workshop drew 23 participants, mostly from Wisconsin secondary schools, but some from as far away as California and Washington state. The educators came to Madison not merely to listen to the presentations of experts, but also to develop their own lesson plans and bring the lessons of Chornobyl home to American students.

By the end of the five-day program, they produced plans ranging in scope from a unit for third graders on hazardous waste to a weeklong comprehensive lesson for older students on radiation, incorporating video, journal activities and science instruction. As part of the unit, students act out a simulation of the evacuation of Prypiat, the town that housed most of Chornobyl's workers. The idea behind the simulation is to get children, many of whom were born after the disaster, to think about Chornobyl not as a regional event that ended neatly with the construction of the protective barrier around the stricken reactor, but as an international catastrophe whose ramifications are still being felt in Ukraine, Belarus and parts of Russia.

Several teachers echoed the imperative to examine the accident at Chornobyl from a variety of disciplines. One social studies teacher found that the most valuable aspect of the workshop was "the linking of different disciplines around a central theme - it gives a much more comprehensive view of events, as well as their causes and consequences." A colleague in science concurred: "It promoted the idea of the strength of interdisciplinary learning. I can work this into my teaching."

Copies of the lesson plans from "Chornobyl: A Theme to Integrate the Natural and Social Sciences" are available at no cost for North American teachers from the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia. Please address queries to Outreach Coordinator, CREECA, 1155 Observatory Drive, 210 Ingraham Hall, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail, creeca3@macc.wisc.edu; phone, (608) 262-3379; fax, (608) 265-3062; or visit the CREECA website at polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/creeca/.

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