You know that you encountered a challenging and thought provoking topic in class when you are up past 3AM mulling over the class readings and discussion from earlier that day. This was my experience last week. In my Life and Learning in the Middle School class, we covered the important topic of bullying in schools. Before that night, I had an idea about the definition of bullying, who was being bullied, and how often students were bullied. I was wrong. The issue is so much bigger and broader than I could have ever imagined.
For example, I was surprised to learn that there are so many types of bullying. I knew about physical and verbal aggression, but I had never given much thought to the direct and indirect, social and relational aspects of verbal bullying. I naively thought that bullying typically happened in a direct manner. What I found interesting was that starting rumors or excluding others was actually a form of indirect verbal bullying. As a preschool teacher, I have seen bullying occur many times at our school and whenever we see it, we quickly put an end to the behavior. Because it is definitely easier to identify bullying that is overtly aggressive physically or verbally, I imagine instances of indirect bullying are occurring unnoticed. This reminded me of last week’s Paley reading from our Becoming a Professional Educator course. In the book You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, Paley shares how some children exclude other children and how hurtful this can be to the child who is being left out. (81,82) “They won’t let me play!” and “But I don’t want to play with him/her!” are unfortunately phrases that I am used to hearing as a teacher. I now understand that this exclusion is a form of bullying too, and it needs to be treated as such.
What is frustrating about bullying in schools is that it is so prevalent and hard to control. Many schools have policies on bullying, but what is being done to prevent this aggression from taking place? How is this being addressed in our local schools, and which methods are most and least effective? Since bullying can begin as young as preschool age, what can I do as a current preschool teacher to combat this and to help both the bully and the child being bullied? What I do know is that this is an urgent, nation wide problem and there are no easy answers. While it has caused some sleeplessness, it has ignited an interest in me to delve much deeper into this topic.
I too have seen bullying in very young children. It makes me sad for all the children involved.
ReplyDeleteI think trying to create an environment with our students, where we model and demonstrate respect (much like Paley does in her class) will go a long way to combat bullying. Teaching young children how to treat people is so important and with a strong foundation they will carry these lessons with them.