Surviving Bullies Project Blog
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Expanding Horizons
owdy all!
It’s been busy, busy, busy for us here at the Surviving Bullies Project, but as always, full of excitement and contemplation.
For the past month and a half, we have been working to develop a pilot program with the staff of a New York City high school. It has been a tremendous learning experience for Dickon, Shan Shan, and me. In the time that we have been working on this pilot program, we have realized that we need to shift our focal point a bit.
When we were asked by the teachers of the New York City high school to come in and develop an anti-bullying curriculum, we were quite nervous about simply giving a copy of the workbook to every 9th grader. Our workbook is a tremendous effort to help the individual who has been pushed out of a social group, but it only tackles one area of the bullying behavior issue. We worried that our target audience would be too small, and we might be alienating those kids who weren’t being bullied. How, we wondered, would we be able to reach people who were not being bullied—to gain empathy and raise awareness among those individuals? Our discussions with the teachers, and among ourselves, led us to the conclusion that we needed something that was more tangible and accessible to all students.
And then Dickon had an epiphany: why not use a case study that he had written up a couple of years prior, that happened to fit perfectly with the students at this said high school? We liked the idea of using a case study in the classroom because it has proved highly effective as a teaching method at the top business, medical, and law schools. Dickon’s case study chronicles the real-life story of a girl who experienced peer cruelty, isolation, feelings of worthlessness, and had even attempted suicide. We could use this case study as a piece of literature for the 9th graders to read, and include relevant themes we wanted them to extract from the text. Since the text was a story, they could discuss the difficult issues surrounding peer cruelty, without feeling like they were being examined under a microscope. Instead, they would be one step removed from the matters at hand, and teachers and students could talk without personal issues surfacing in the classroom. The workbook would still be used, but it would be filled out according to the situation of the girl in the case study. And if it turned out that an individual was having personal experiences with bullying behavior, we would have resources on-hand to help that student in a private manner.
This more inclusive approach to teaching students about bullying behavior led us to the concept of a “total community” program, in which all members of a community are educated about bullying behavior, character education, and moral integrity. After all, improving school climate and safety are not just about helping individuals, but about improving an entire community’s methods of relating to one another. We believe that it is not just the mean kid, the target, or the bystander that needs educating, but all school personnel, parents, and members of the outlying community. Anyone can be a bystander to a situation, and anyone can be subjected to bullying behavior, so all of us need to know how to prevent it, and how to deal with it if it does happen. We want to teach members of the community that being a passive bystander is the same as enabling a situation to occur. Enabling sends the message that this behavior is okay, when we should be saying that passivity is unacceptable.
We are now actively working to develop this idea of a “total community” program that we can implement in schools. We are really excited about where this is going, and we think this is the road to take in order to improve the overall climate schools.
Stay tuned!
~Rebecca
Posted by Dickon on 04/09/06 at 01:31 PM
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