New Bedford Anti-Bullying Training

On the first Saturday of April Kristen, Ben, Caitlin and I headed down to New Bedford to facilitate an Anti-Bullying Training to a group of sixth grade boys who attend Saturday Academy at the Dennison Memorial Community Center. Although I have facilitated the anti-bullying curriculum before, this event seemed like our first real solo facilitation, as Ben, Kristen and I planned the agenda, chose the activities to include, and prepared all the materials needed for the day. It was a great experience and I look forward to facilitating similar trainings in the future! We incorporated several games as well as more serious activities into the curriculum to give the students variety and get them moving around so as not to get bored. For example, we played “Unfreeze a Friend” a game in which all players have to balance an object on their head while moving around the room doing things like hopping and skipping and must freeze when the object falls off their head. A peer then has to replace the object in order for them to become unfrozen and continue participating in the game. This game is used as a lead in for discussing the role of bystanders in the perpetuation of bullying. We then had the students take a quiz about bystanders and discussed the answers as a group. In the Sport in Society model bystanders are a critical element to understanding and fighting bullying in our schools and communities and thus the combination of the above two activities is a great way to get this message across. The students we were working with have recently dealt with very sever incidents of bullying in their community, and thus it was timely that we were presenting a training on bullying to these youth. With their experiences in mind the students all responded with great ideas on how to fight bullying in their community and were open to discussing the issue even though it was one that must have been painful for many of them to think about. I think that getting the students to see bullying as a problem that they can help actively tackle, even if they maybe neither victim nor perpetrator, can be empowering and allow students to see that there is no one way to deal with bullying, but as long as you do something, even if it is just walking away from the mass of people egging on a fight, they can make a difference. The staff at the community center was also very welcoming to us and I look forward to hearing their feedback on how the training affected their students and what the students have to say as they continue to discuss issues of bullying and violence in their community.