Teaching teens by setting the scene.

For many teenagers, summer is a time for blockbuster movies, often featuring catastrophic natural--or alien-caused--disasters. For the last four years the Boston University Superfund Basic Research Program (BU SBRP) Outreach Core and the Boston Area Health Education Center (BAHEC; a program of the Boston Public Health Commission) have helped spice up local teens' summers by using this fascination with disaster scenarios to empower youth to think about their connection to the environment.

The Environmental Health Disaster Scenario program conducts group role-modeling activities based around contamination or pollution emergencies at the beginning of the BAHEC's Youth to Health Careers Summer Program as part of a health expo that features different careers in public health. Students learn how complicated public health decision making can be, and how quickly decisions must sometimes be made. The scenarios place the students in roles they might not normally find themselves in--as an environmental expert or public health official, for example. They also give the students a glimpse at potential public health careers beyond the familiar ones such as nursing, medicine, or pharmacy.

BAHEC, the local branch of a nationwide, federally funded program seeking to diversify, increase awareness of, and improve the quality of the health care service system, works with local universities, public school systems, and community agencies to recruit students for the summer program. The students are aged 14-18 and live in disadvantaged neighborhoods of Boston.

Each scenario exercise lasts about two hours and can involve as many as 100 or as few as 15 students. Madeleine Kangsen Scammell, outreach coordinator for the BU SBRP, says the scenarios are modeled after workshops that public health officials conduct to prepare for a public health emergency. In each scenario, several students take on the role of public health officials presented with an environmental health emergency and must work through possible questions and concerns that might arise. The students interview different people who could be affected by the scenario, from concerned residents to environmental experts to business owners (these roles are played by BU SBRP investigators and BU School of Public Health faculty members). After interviewing these community stakeholders, the students formulate and present their final decisions on how to address the problem.

Among other scenarios, students have had to decide how to deal with the discovery of dioxin-contaminated chickens on a poultry farm and whether to spray pesticides to control West Nile virus. Scenarios such as these teach the students how to identify possible risks associated with each environmental hazard, and provide insight into the media's role in influencing public opinion. In the case of the dioxin-contaminated chicken, participants examine the processing and distribution of the food to see where the contamination might have originated. They also discover what role government agencies play in protecting the public's health by regulating different phases of food production. In the West Nile virus scenario, students consider the possible dangers of spraying pesticides in neighborhoods--a current concern in Boston. They must also balance these dangers against the risks of infection with the virus.

The scenarios encourage the students to form, express, and support their own opinions, which they do with great enthusiasm. "The students get very excited when defending their decisions, and although we do not set the scenario up as a debate, it often turns into one," says Scammell. "Each team defends their decision as if it were the real thing. Sometimes they run for the mic when their turn has passed, wanting to respond to a point that has been made. No one sits still during the report-back."

The outreach partners are constantly adapting and improving the program model, and feel that it can be easily replicated by interested organizations. The materials are available for free online at http://www.bu.edu/bahec/.