Our First Lesson in Advocacy

Title: Bullying

Academic Areas: ELA, Health, Math
Duration of service: Three weeks to one month
Character Virtues: Responsibility, Respect
Service Areas: Human Services, Public Safety

Service Learning Project Description:

After a recent increase in bullying referrals, a local middle school has established the need to develop a service learning project to combat issues of heterosexist bullying in the hallways. Many students reported being bullied while switching classes, specifically mentioning bullies using derogatory language such as “gay,” “faggot,” and “queer.” Students in the 6th grade class will create a month-long, school-wide campaign to identify causes of bullying occurring in the school and work with school officials to develop a proactive awareness program to stop heterosexist bullying before it becomes a referral situation.

Goals and Objectives

Academic

Learning Goal: In a persuasive essay, students will be able to articulate their position as well as provide suitable evidence from the text to support their stance.

Standard: ELA, Standard #3: Language for Critical Analysis and Evaluation

Learning Goal: Students will be able to identify and label threats, bullying and/or acts of violence going on in the middle school.

Standard: Health, Standard #2: A Safe and Healthy Environment

Learning Goal: Students will be able to develop charts to explain student survey data.

Standard: MST, Standard #3: Mathematics

Service

Community need: The middle school has seen an increased number of bullying referrals linked to heterosexist bullying.
Possible Community Partners: Local human rights organizations, law enforcement
Objective: Increase the tolerance awareness levels of middle school students.
Objective: Increase student conflict resolution skills.

Character

Virtue: Responsibility
Objective: Students will become more proactive in monitoring their fellow students’ behaviors.

Virtue: Respect
Objective: Students will begin using appropriate language in the classroom and hallways.

Key Activities

Key Planning Activities

1. (ELA) After learning the components of a persuasive essay, students will write a five paragraph essay based on the book ‘The Misfits,’ by James Howe. Possible essay prompts may include:
• Do students or administrators have more power to stop bullying?
• Which character’s confrontation techniques contributed most to the conclusion of the book?
• There are four characters in the book who receive equal attention, why do you think students chose to fixate discussion primarily on Joe?

2. (Health) After learning to recognize what constitutes a threat, bullying or act of violence students will work to develop a student survey to measure the occurrence of these components. Students will identify specific behaviors of these three that occur in school and develop questions in groups that may be used on the survey. The survey will include a specific section highlighting incidents involving heterosexism.

3. (Math) After health students have developed, critiqued and finalized the bullying survey, math students will distribute the survey and collect, tabulate and analyze results. Students will develop charts, tables and graphs to illustrate their findings.

Key Service Activities

1. Survey findings will be presented to the 6th grade students, school and district administrators and key community personnel (such as police officers).

2. Students will form a committee to work on bullying initiatives in school. Three 6th grade students will be chosen by teachers and three additional 6th grade students will be elected by their peers. Two teachers, two administrators and two community members will also be asked to join the committee by the chosen/elected students.

3. The committee will work to develop a campaign to stop hallway bullying (with a particular focus on strategies to combat heterosexist bullying), including awareness activities and an advertising campaign.

Key Reflection Activities

1. (oral) In small groups in health class, students will discuss bullying they see in the hallways.

2. (written) Students will write a persuasive essay in English taking a stance on how to most effectively confront bullying.

3. (performance) Math students will present survey information to students and key school and community personnel.

Demonstration Activity

The formed committee will work with the 6th grade to host No Name Calling Week in January (www.nonamecallingweek.org). All 6th grade students will be responsible for creating posters in art class and making announcements, as well as presenting skits during a school-wide assembly on Monday. The committee will also accept new student members at this time to include 7th and 8th graders and continue to meet throughout the school year to further monitor and adjust initiatives.