Abstract:

The Vietnam War had a profound and lasting impact on the United States and Vietnam. In the case of both countries, the ability to study and learn from the tragic events encountered provides opportunities to reflect, problem-solve, and learn. As educators, the ability to understand how students react to war-related moral dilemmas opens possibilities to inform educators better how to plan and deliver Cold War-related lessons and the advancement of classroom discussion. One method of promoting historical empathy and moral dilemmas is the Harvard Social Studies Project's moral reasoning approach. Designed in the 1960s to teach students to examine and analyze controversial issues through the discussion process, students were presented with a series of situations and scenarios where students studied, understood various points of view, clarified values, made judgments, and defended their positions to their peers.

Incorporating elements of the Harvard Social Studies Project, both American and Vietnamese researchers included the lesson titled “The Wounded Prisoner,” which is a fictional account of either an American or Vietnamese military unit in Vietnam, where a small group of soldiers had captured an enemy combatant, labeled in this exercise as either an American or Vietnamese soldier. In the fictional scenario, the students' designated military unit captures a ‘wounded prisoner’ but must hasten to return to their military outpost before enemy forces overrun their positions. In this lesson, the wounded prisoner impedes the military unit's retreat, resulting in a moral dilemma concerning their safety, the prisoner's life, and the acceptance or refusal of conflicting orders from a superior officer.

Designed to measure both American and Vietnamese students' actions, the researchers sought to attempt to answer the following questions: a) how does a fictional war-related lesson affect students’ decision-making, and b) are there levels of difficulty concerning student decision-making?

Overall, findings indicated that both American and Vietnamese students had equal difficulty formulating decisions based on war-related values. While both countries adhered to obeying and enacting most orders presented, the ability to engage the order to kill the enemy prisoner illustrated unanimous defiance.

Keywords:

Moral dilemma, historical empathy, affective domain, cognitive domain.