Hello world!
Bullying is sort of
my thing. No, I do not enjoy bullying others, but when it comes to being an educator, counselor, someone involved in children and youth...I take bullying very seriously. I did my first big 'graduate level' paper on Cyberbullying, which in turn inspired me to do my research paper on fostering resiliency as a response to bullying (instead of anti-bullying). That said, I am actually not a big supporter of the anti-bullying approach. But more on that later...
Anyhow, this weekend I went to a presentation on Bullying-specifically,
How Counselors Can Support School Climate/Prevent Bullying. From the get-go, the presenter let us know that we will not leave with all the answers. I appreciated that. As a participant, we each had opportunities to discuss what has/has not worked for us (individually) and why. This was inspiring. We were also given handouts and handy resources. I wanted to share one of those handouts with you all. It is a short article from Education Week by Lyn Mikel Brown:
10 Ways to Move Beyond Bully Prevention (And Why We
Should)
Seven years ago, I helped found a nonprofit organization
committed to changing the culture for girls. Our work was based on the
health-psychology notion of “hardiness”—a way of talking about resilience that
not only identifies what girls need to thrive in an increasingly complex and
stressful world, but also makes clear that adults are responsible for creating
safe spaces for girls to grow, think critically, and work together to make
their
lives better.
As a result of this work, I’ve grown concerned lately that
“bully prevention” has all but taken over the way we think about, talk about,
and respond to the relational lives of children and youths in schools. So, from
our group’s strength-based approach, I offer 10 ways to move beyond what is too
often being sold as a panacea for schools’ social ills, and is becoming, I
fear, a problem in and of itself:
Stop labeling kids.
Bully-prevention programs typically put kids into three categories: bullies,
victims, and bystanders. Labeling children in these ways denies what we know to
be true: We are all complex beings with the capacity to do harm and to do good,
sometimes within the same hour. It also makes the child the problem, which downplays
the important role of parents, teachers, the school system, a provocative and
powerful media culture, and societal injustices children experience every day.
Labeling kids bullies, for that matter, contributes to the negative climate and
name-calling we’re trying to address.
Talk accurately about behavior. If it’s sexual harassment, call it sexual
harassment; if it’s homophobia, call it homophobia; and so forth. To lump
disparate behaviors under the generic “bullying” is to efface real differences
that affect young people’s lives. Bullying is a broad term that de-genders,
de-races, de-everythings school safety. Because of this, as the
sexual-harassment expert Nan Stein has noted, embracing anti-bullying
legislation can actually undermine the legal rights and protections offered by
anti-harassment laws. Calling behaviors what they are helps us educate children
about their rights, affirms their realities, encourages more-complex and
meaningful solutions, opens up a dialogue, invites children to participate in
social change, and ultimately protects them.
Move beyond the individual. Children’s behaviors are greatly affected by their life histories and
social contexts. To understand why a child uses aggression toward others, it’s
important to understand what impact race, ethnicity, social class, gender,
religion, and ability has on his or her daily experiences in school—that is,
how do these realities affect the kinds of attention and resources the child
receives, where he fits in, whether she feels marginal or privileged in the
school. Such differences in social capital, cultural capital, and power
relations deeply affect a child’s psychological and relational experiences in
school.
Reflect reality.
Many schools across the country have adopted an approach developed by the
Norwegian educator Dan Olweus, the “Olweus Bullying Prevention Program,” even
though it has not been effectively evaluated with U.S. samples. Described as a
“universal intervention for the reduction and prevention of bully/victim
problems,” the Olweus program downplays those differences that make a
difference. But even when bully-prevention programs have been adequately
evaluated, the University of Illinois’ Dorothy Espelage argues, they often show
less-than-positive results in urban schools or with minority populations. “We
do not have a one-size-fits-all school system,” she reminds
us. Because the United States has a diversity of race,
ethnicity, and language, and inequalities between schools, bully-prevention
efforts here need to reflect that reality.
Adjust expectations.
We hold kids to ideals and expectations that we as adults could never meet. We
expect girls to ingest a steady diet of media “mean girls” and always be nice
and kind, and for boys to engage a culture of violence and never lash out. We
expect kids never to express anger to adults, never to act in mean or hurtful
ways to one another, even though they may spend much of the day in schools they
don’t feel safe in, and with teachers and other students who treat them with
disrespect. Moreover, we expect kids to behave in ways most of us don’t even
value very much: to obey all the rules (regardless of their perceived or real
unfairness), to never resist or refuse or fight back.
It’s important to promote consistent consequences—the
hallmarks of most bully-prevention programs—but it’s also critically important
to create space for honest conversations about who benefits from certain norms
and rules and who doesn’t. If we allow kids to speak out, to think critically
and question unfairness, we provide the groundwork for civic engagement.
Listen to kids. In
her book Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit talks about the
importance of “listening that requires not only open eyes and ears, but also
hearts and minds.” Again, consistent consequences are important; used well,
they undermine privilege and protect those who are less powerful. But to make
such a system work, schools have to listen to all students. It’s the only way
to ensure that staff members are not using discipline and consistent
consequences simply to promote the status quo.
Embrace grassroots movements. There’s nothing better than student initiated change. Too many
bully-prevention programs are top-heavy with adult-generated rules, meetings,
and trainings. We need to empower young people. This includes being on the
lookout for positive grassroots resistance, ready to listen to and support and
sometimes channel youth movements when they arise. We need to listen to
students, take up their just causes, understand the world they experience,
include them in the dialogue about school norms and rules, and use their creative energy to
illuminate and challenge unfairness.
Be proactive, not reactive. In Maine, we have a nationally recognized Civil Rights Team Project.
Youth-led, school-based preventive teams work to increase safety, educate their
peers, and combat hate violence, prejudice, and harassment in more than 250
schools across the state. This kind of proactive youth-empowerment work is
sorely needed, but is too often lost in the midst of zero tolerance policies
and top-down bully-prevention efforts. And yet such efforts work. According to
a study conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, or
GLSEN, youth-led gay straight
alliances make schools safer for all students.
Build coalitions.
Rather than bully prevention, let’s emphasize ally- and coalition-building. We
need to affirm and support the definition of coalition that activist Bernice
Johnson Reagon suggests: work that’s difficult, exhausting, but necessary “for
all of us to feel that this is our world.”
Accentuate the positive. Instead of labeling kids, let’s talk about them as potential leaders,
affirm their strengths, and believe that they can do good, brave, remarkable
things. The path to safer, less violent schools lies less in our control over
children than in appreciating their need to have more control in their lives,
to feel important, to be visible, to have an effect on people and situations.
Bully
prevention has become a huge for-profit industry. Let’s not let the steady
stream of training sessions, rules, policies, consequence charts, and
no-bullying posters keep us from listening well, thinking critically, and
creating approaches that meet the singular needs of our schools and communities.
Until next time...
-B
