The Bullying Project

Taylor and I are wrapping up our experience at New Paltz middle school with a final project with the classes. We were asked by our teacher to create a project with big idea of bullying. After a couple brainstorming sessions, we had come up with the final idea inspired by postsecret.com. Created by Frank Warren, Post Secret invites people from all over the world to send him postcards anonymously with a secret and image on the face of the card. He continues to scan the card and post the best on his blog. After doing a project similar to this in Art for the Exceptional Child, we decided to create a lesson for the middle schoolers.

In searching for support material, we came across the movie "The Bully Project." This documentary was part of many film festivals and will be released to theaters soon. Check out the movies website here. For those too lazy, here's the trailer.

 

Another video we showed the class, our teacher Mrs. Sturgis came across. She was interested in creating videos with the students as the bully project prior to our post secret idea. This is similar to what she was looking for...

So after a day or two of brainstorming and deciding on the final project, we came to the decision between Taylor, myself, Mrs. Sturgis, and the second art teacher Mrs. Grushaw, that all the students in art would participate in the post secret regardless of their grade. This section "bullying" would be introduced to the students grades 6-8 and every student would create an anonymous secret and place it in a box. We would collect all secrets, filter for inappropriate words/sentences, and type them to help for anonymity. The next day of the lesson students would take someone elses secret and create a post card representing it. These would all be collected and hung around the school so everywhere students go there would be post cards and secrets to see. It would hit students harder because these are REAL secrets from their peers. Here are some of the post secrets we found from the original blog we showed the class. 

 

And here is our teacher example we showed the class. Ours is larger than the students will be. 

"Anytime someone said anything stupid I'd write it on a post-it, put it on the back of my door and laugh about it later."

Again, to expand on what all of us teachers thought for projects it was the decision that each grade would create post cards as the intro to the subject. From there each grade would have their own project to show. For example, the thoughts as of right now are 6th grade- creating lifesize silhouettes to be placed around the school as if bullying was taking place. (ex: in a stair well there could be a silhouette of a boy pushing another boy down the stairs) 7th grade- using Wordle to create posters with words that describe bullying and how they feel. 8th grade- create short films in groups based on situations from the post secret project. A different film will be shown every morning on the announcements for the school to see as bully awareness.

Just after the first day of introducing the topic, students seem excited and interested in the projects. They have voiced their opinions and think its "cool we are doing this so other kids can know what some people think." They were able to share experiences and see that other students in the class related to them, even when they thought they were alone. I can't wait for our next day to work on these with the class. We may be going in an extra day just to see the progress! I think this is something a lot of students could benefit from in other schools. Bullying is a nationwide problem that needs to be addressed. Mrs. Grushaw is even taking ideas from this project to the high school students!