Surviving Bullies Project Blog
Friday, April 07, 2006
Introduction
Hello everyone!
I’m Rebecca, and I am kicking off the Surviving Bullies Project blog. We are a fast-paced, rapidly evolving team, and we want to keep you as up-to-date on what we’re up to as possible. We decided to start a blog to build up communication between ourselves and our viewers, to raise awareness about our project, and mostly because we are in the midst of so many developments that we want to keep all of you posted on every transformation (and the thought process behind it). We will be chronicling for you the adventures and misadventures of the Surviving Bullies Project and Surviving Bullies Charity, Inc.
As the plot thickens, we will keep you updated…it may not be every day, but we will try to give you “new news” (hehe) about our goings-on at least on a weekly basis. If you are moved to comment, or have suggestions, or just plain like something we said, feel free to say so. We want to know what you think!
Stay tuned.
Cheers!
Posted by Dickon on 04/07 at 01:29 PM
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Sunday, April 09, 2006
Expanding Horizons
Howdy all!
It’s been busy, busy, busy for us here at the Surviving Bullies Project, but as always, full of excitement and contemplation.
For the past month and a half, we have been working to develop a pilot program with the staff of a New York City high school. It has been a tremendous learning experience for Dickon, Shan Shan, and me. In the time that we have been working on this pilot program, we have realized that we need to shift our focal point a bit.
When we were asked by the teachers of the New York City high school to come in and develop an anti-bullying curriculum, we were quite nervous about simply giving a copy of the workbook to every 9th grader. Our workbook is a tremendous effort to help the individual who has been pushed out of a social group, but it only tackles one area of the bullying behavior issue. We worried that our target audience would be too small, and we might be alienating those kids who weren’t being bullied. How, we wondered, would we be able to reach people who were not being bullied—to gain empathy and raise awareness among those individuals? Our discussions with the teachers, and among ourselves, led us to the conclusion that we needed something that was more tangible and accessible to all students.
And then Dickon had an epiphany: why not use a case study that he had written up a couple of years prior, that happened to fit perfectly with the students at this said high school? We liked the idea of using a case study in the classroom because it has proved highly effective as a teaching method at the top business, medical, and law schools. Dickon’s case study chronicles the real-life story of a girl who experienced peer cruelty, isolation, feelings of worthlessness, and had even attempted suicide. We could use this case study as a piece of literature for the 9th graders to read, and include relevant themes we wanted them to extract from the text. Since the text was a story, they could discuss the difficult issues surrounding peer cruelty, without feeling like they were being examined under a microscope. Instead, they would be one step removed from the matters at hand, and teachers and students could talk without personal issues surfacing in the classroom. The workbook would still be used, but it would be filled out according to the situation of the girl in the case study. And if it turned out that an individual was having personal experiences with bullying behavior, we would have resources on-hand to help that student in a private manner.
This more inclusive approach to teaching students about bullying behavior led us to the concept of a “total community” program, in which all members of a community are educated about bullying behavior, character education, and moral integrity. After all, improving school climate and safety are not just about helping individuals, but about improving an entire community’s methods of relating to one another. We believe that it is not just the mean kid, the target, or the bystander that needs educating, but all school personnel, parents, and members of the outlying community. Anyone can be a bystander to a situation, and anyone can be subjected to bullying behavior, so all of us need to know how to prevent it, and how to deal with it if it does happen. We want to teach members of the community that being a passive bystander is the same as enabling a situation to occur. Enabling sends the message that this behavior is okay, when we should be saying that passivity is unacceptable.
We are now actively working to develop this idea of a “total community” program that we can implement in schools. We are really excited about where this is going, and we think this is the road to take in order to improve the overall climate schools.
Stay tuned!
~Rebecca
Posted by Dickon on 04/09 at 01:31 PM
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
What’s the Deal with the Surviving Bullies Charity
Up until January of 2006, we, the Surviving Bullies Project, worked to “help the individual.” We compassionately and lovingly created the Surviving Bullies Workbook, designed to provide the targets of bullying with practical strategies to regain control of the situation. After two years of research and a year of writing, layout and design, we were finally done.
As much as we hold this workbook close to our hearts, we cringe at the reality that the workbook is designed to help someone who’ve already gone through the emotional turmoil caused by being bullied. Being former targets of bullying, we know how much that sucks, and we wouldn’t wish it upon anybody. We need to do something that prevents people from being bullied, in addition to helping someone in the aftermath of bullying.
That’s when we started to explore the idea of tackling the bullying issue through “empowering the community.”
Here’s our line of thinking: bullying gives people social power. Social power comes from the bystanders. When people bully, they boost their social power while making the targets look weak and embarrassingly uncool.
So if the incentive for someone to bully is social power, and the bystanders are the source of social power, then we figured that our preventative endeavor lies with the bystanders.
In the beginning, we equated “bystanders” with “the student who stood by and watched.” How obvious, right? Wrong. We soon realized that bystanders embody much more than just the students. Bystanders include, teachers, administrators, cafeteria staff, bus drivers, and parents – all members of a school community.
Our dream is to educate all bystanders about the potentially devastating impact of bullying on a target. For the kids, we want to teach them low-risk but effective measures that they can take if they ever find themselves on the sidelines of a bullying incident. If they see someone purposely knock someone else’s stuff onto the floor, for example, standing by and laughing only magnifies the bullies’ power. Directly confronting the bully is risky as it may provoke hostility onto you. A low-risk but effective action that bystanders can take would be helping the target pick up his or her stuff and walking off. This fully takes away the reward bullying usually offers for the perpetrator.
For the teachers and parents, we want to educate them about the sophisticated social subculture of any space that kids gather (e.g. unattended classrooms, playground, cafeteria, hallways, school busses, etc). We also want to enlist them to become coaches who transform their kids from bystanders to allies.
From the cost point of view, this dream of “empowering the community” is expensive. In order to create this program optimally and effectively, we need professionals from a number of arenas such as professional curriculum developers, writers, and multimedia experts.
In March, we sat down as a team and did some number crunching…the final figure: 5 million dollars for a four-year pilot program in four Connecticut schools (which spans across the full racial and socio-economic spectrum).
We are in the process of fund-raising for our dream program through the Surviving Bullies Charity, Inc., and we need your help! Each dollar you donate brings us that much closer to our goal. We are also appealing to educational foundations to join us in our campaign to fund and develop our program.
-Shan Shan
Posted by Dickon on 04/11 at 03:50 PM
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Thursday, April 13, 2006
Website and Project Promotion
So we’ve got our website up and running…hurray! It’s very exciting to see our work up and viewable to all on public domain. I’ve done lots of hunting around over the last couple of months trying to locate the best possible resources for our audience. I’ve found interesting bullying news articles, comprehensive websites and programs, extensive bullying research, and must-reads for young adults and parents. I’ve tried to be as critical and picky as possible so that we can build up a solid resource base upon which others can rely.
In addition, Shan Shan and I have worked hard to find prominent figures in our culture who were bullied when they were in school. We’ve tried to vary our selection as much as possible, and have included actors, directors, singers, comedians, models, and athletes. We want all of you out there to know that you are not alone, and that other people who are now extremely successful, accomplished, and widely respected, were once outsiders. They got through their tough times, and so can you. We have carefully chosen these individuals because we think their stories are provocative and that each of them shows strength, determination, and perseverance. These are people who have overcome a whole spectrum of obstacles. We hope that you will find motivation and inspiration reading about each success story.
That’s all for now. Until next time…
Posted by Dickon on 04/13 at 03:57 PM
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Saturday, April 15, 2006
Website and Project Promotion II
We are currently on a campaign to boost our rankings on the search engines so we can reach our audience with the information we’ve worked hard to present. I never knew how much behind-the-scenes work went into making a website mainstream! One way we’ve been trying to establish ourselves and get our project out there is through reciprocal linking. All this means is that we needed approval from other websites that ours was useful, and a subsequent link to their sites. An easy concept, but a little harder to actualize. I have sent out letters to these different anti-bullying websites and organizations explaining our project’s mission, and why we chose to link them to our own website. The goal is to demonstrate to these other websites that we are a serious project dedicated to providing support for bullied individuals, their friends, and family, and that our resources are worth linking to their sites. If they link us, we rise in the search engines, and are more likely to show up in your line of vision. We’re doing pretty well establishing ourselves thus far.
If any of you out there can think of any other resources that have been helpful to you that we should add to our site, please let us know. Also, if you like our site and find it useful, please pass the word on to your friends and to other sites.
More later. Cheers!
~Rebecca
Posted by Dickon on 04/15 at 04:17 PM
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Monday, April 17, 2006
How to Tell Our Story?
Hello hello!
For the past few days I have been writing an article to submit to newspapers, magazines and other media outlets for the purpose of telling the story of the Surviving Bullies Project and increasing awareness of our campaign. With this story, I hope to educate and engage as many people as possible about who we are and what we are trying to do by spreading the word about our mission.
I have found writing about a project tough on many levels…one has to find the right way to begin the story, one has to figure out what tone they are trying to achieve, one has to determine the structure of the article, the narrative voice, the perspective, the overall message. All of these components come into play. And then there is the huge challenge of how to come across to those reading about us, as powerful and purposeful, not sensational and dismissive.
My goal is to write an article that will draw people in, one that will have the reader’s full attention through to the end. My goal is that when readers do finish the article, they are inspired to get up and do something about what they’ve read, not to forget about it when they rise from their seats. My goal is to make individuals understand how imperative it is that peer cruelty and other bullying behaviors be addressed immediately. My goal is to demonstrate to readers the ways in which these behaviors are hurting our youth and the climate of our schools.
It was not so long ago, last May to be exact, that I was in college writing papers for my English professors. One would think that writing an article for newspapers and magazines about our project would not be such a difficult endeavor—not unlike writing another English paper. And yet, this has been one of the most arduous “papers” I have ever written. William Faulkner once said, “If the story is in you, it has got to come out.” The story is certainly in me, but teasing it out is a process in itself. It has forced me to ask myself what responsibility a writer has to society, and how these responsibilities can be achieved through the written word. I think one of the biggest responsibilities of writers is to speak truth, and to communicate in a clear way and make my message the community’s message. And when troubles are on the horizon, I think a writer’s responsibility is to identify the issues, to shed light on them, so that they can then be addressed (or at the very least acknowledged by society).
Which begs the question: what do you think a writer’s responsibility is to society? I would be most interested to hear from you on this subject. In the meantime, wish me luck telling the story of the SBPeeps! :-)
More later.
~Rebecca
Posted by Dickon on 04/17 at 04:17 PM
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Thursday, April 27, 2006
Radio Interviews
More breaking news from the SBP!
In the last week or so, we have begun to go public with our project on live radio stations all over the world! What an exciting ride it has been so far. We hope that our interviews will demonstrate to listeners our enthusiasm and dedication to tackling mean behaviors and promoting caring school communities.
With Dickon as spokesperson for the SBP, we have been working as a team to prep for our radio interviews. We have made a concerted effort to come up with the correct sound bites for our audience, thereby lessening the possibility of misinterpretation. But this has been tough because radio hosts are asking us serious questions about complex issues, often in a combative style. We have had to work hard to counteract some hosts’ challenging and provocative questions with earnest responses that indicate our steadfast commitment to curbing peer cruelty.
Having access to such a sizeable media outlet has been valuable because it has allowed us to communicate our message to a multitude of people, in particular those young adults, parents, and school personnel who could greatly benefit from our endeavors. However, the aggressive interview style of some hosts has been a bit scary—some of their questions have been obviously intended to halt us in our tracks. Though these interviews have caused a bit of anxiety, they have been phenomenally good because they have forced us to quickly get to the heart of the bullying issue. They have compelled us to come off the fence about certain issues and to take concrete positions. We’ve been thinking through difficult questions such as: Why do bullies bully? An intricate and complex question indeed, but after much debate the answer is becoming clearer in our minds. Stay tuned and we will soon unveil our conclusions.
Posted by Dickon on 04/27 at 12:33 PM
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Friday, April 28, 2006
Oh China
Hey everyone!
The Chinese translation of the Surviving Bullies Workbook is finally finished!
It was surreal to see the content that we’ve come to know so well in a different language. For me, the Chinese version is unrecognizable in appearance, but it’s familiar when I read it because the ideas are the same. I grew up speaking Chinese. I still speak it at home. So reading the Chinese version was quite the mind trip it brings me into a different context – home and childhood.
Continuing on this personal note, after the workbook was translated into Chinese, my family was able to read it. A few days ago, after having read the workbook, my uncle told me a heartbreaking story about my dad. He told me that as he was reading, an image kept coming to his mind. When my dad, his older brother, was nine, he used to fetch water for the family from the river that ran by their house. My uncle remembers seeing my dad coming home barefoot a few times—a bit scratched up and red-faced (like he’d been crying)—because a group of boys would tease him and throw his flip-flops into the river.
I was stunned to hear that story. I never would have guessed that my dad was a target of bullying. I feel sorry for that little boy my dad once was, and I can’t help but think that this must be how my mom felt when she first heard about my experiences with bullying, three years after the fact. Today I write to you all with a wider emotional perspective on the issue of bullying. This project has been one that has fostered my personal and professional growth while allowing me to make positive contributions to society.
Stay tuned for more developments on the SBP in China.
Cheers,
Shan Shan
Posted by Dickon on 04/28 at 11:09 AM
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Monday, May 01, 2006
How to Market Our Book?
With a fast-approaching publication date of August 1 for the Surviving Bullies Workbook, we’ve just kicked off our book marketing campaign and have been industriously sending out review copies to book reviewers for consideration. I am leading this effort.
Most book review venues require that publishers send in their galleys or finished copies as much as 3-4 months in advance. This means we realistically need to send out our workbook between the dates of April 1 and May 1.
I’ve sent out copies to the big wigs like Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal. Entire eight-hour days have been spent scouring the internet for viable and reputable book reviewers. I’ve been off on wild goose chases many times, often thinking that I’ve found good reviewers and then realizing that some writers are just fulfilling their book-reading hobby, and don’t actually have any credentials or background knowledge.
I’ve found newspaper websites have been the most difficult to navigate--they seem to take great pains in making themselves as hard to reach as possible. I find myself getting lost in their labyrinthian websites trying to find the right people to contact!
I have sent out promotional packages consisting of the book, vital information, and a cover letter to all of the large newspaper conglomerates and well-known review journals including New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, The Bloomsbury Review, and The Boston Book Review. The disconcerting thing is that most of these publications will not even notify us of a review, we just have to hope and check their pages often. When all is said and done I will have probably sent out a few hundred review copies to publications across the country!
And since I’ve got so much on my plate in these ensuing weeks, I’d better conclude this blog entry now. More soon.
Posted by Dickon on 05/01 at 10:00 AM
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Monday, May 08, 2006
The Pilot Program Results are in!
Hello all!
Last Wednesday, the SBP traveled to New York City to debrief with the teachers who implemented the pilot anti-bullying program in their advisory classes.
The teachers went through Susana’s Story, a case study about a teenage girl who was being bullied by students in the new town she moved to. They also created corresponding activities for each class. The program lasted ten 40-minute advisory classes.
We came away from Wednesday’s meeting very excited. The teachers unanimously expressed that their students loved the story. We were especially struck by one teachers’ comment: “[the curriculum] opened the kids up to themselves.” Many of the students at this Manhattan high school strongly identified with Susana and opened up about their own experiences.
This type of feedback made us realize that the Susana curriculum will not only help students in general, but it will help us reach the kids in trouble and actualize our mission for the Surviving Bullies Workbook. The teachers suggested that the workbook might be incorporated into the program in two ways. One way would be having students fill out a workbook for Susana (the main character in the case study), and coming up with strategies to help resolve the difficulties she experiences. At the same time, this exercise would indirectly provide those students who are being bullied themselves with the tools and confidence to solve their own problems. Also, actual copies of the workbook could be made available for those who need them.
More "The Pilot Program Results are in!"
Posted by Dickon on 05/08 at 04:08 PM
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