Elemek megjelenítése címkék szerint: Bullying Prevention

CYBERBULLYING

Málaga, Spain – December 4-8, 2023

When we first arrived, our Spanish trainer, Manolo, warmly welcomes us and introduced himself and then asked each participant to briefly introduce himself or herself. Participants’ countries were Poland, Hungary and Croatia. We were introduced with a platform called Padlet where the timetable and the Info Pack were uploaded which we had had received before our mobility to get familiar with what we were going to see and do. Padlet became the location where we needed to do our assignments including writing a paragraph and uploading a photo introducing ourselves, uploading presentations about our schools, reporting each day’s activities including photos, and writing down some notes from the activities we had during the course comparing bullying with cyberbullying. On the second day, the trainer chose to have the outdoor activity instead of the third day which turned out to be a good idea. Although for some reason, the application Action bound for scavenger hunt did not function on his phone, but we had a very nice and informative walk through Malaga including a hike to the hill where the castle remains were there to enjoy the picturesque scenery of Malaga beach and port. Manolo was ready to explain all about the history of the places and tried to answer questions that we had about different things. He helped us to find a local restaurant to experience the cuisine that the locals have. We also tried to get familiar with some basic Spanish. During the trip, we exchanged experiences about Erasmus+ which added value to our outdoor cultural activity. From day 3 and onwards, we had a more thorough examination into the course including practical works, different cyberbullying case scenarios where we worked in pairs, sharing best practices in bullying prevention and response, defining what is bullying and characterizing the bully and the victim. Bullying is hurtful, repetitive, intentional and always happens when there is power imbalance. Cyberbullying is one of the forms which uses the digital technologies to harass, intimidate, or humiliate others. This can be in public or in private. Bystanders’ role was also mentioned to be a very important asset. Detection is the first step where the role of parent-teacher communication was discussed to be of an essence for collaboration. My personal favorite was having anonymous reporting systems in the school. Among the thirteen actions that can be taken, documenting the evidence stood out for me to implement. A highlight was for me when listing the different forms of bullying was that many times it can be as simply as giving silent treatment to a student where classmates choose not to talk or deal with a certain student. Another crucial point which was discussed and worth having a workshop in the sending organization was about school programs and policies in bullying prevention. Several apps and websites, like Rethink app, Anti-bullying measures on Instagram, Anti-Bullying Alliance among others were introduced as resources to further our knowledge and preparedness against cyberbullying. Finally, discussions about future cooperation and follow up activities were made along with exchanging contact information and receiving our certificates.

Conflict Management, Emotional Intelligence and Bullying Prevention

11-16 July Florence, Tuscany

Szabó Steve

I took part in this programme as the first mobility of our second Erasmus project involving 7 teachers and 2 groups of students at my international high school Avicenna IC in Budapest, called:

Building bridges between EU schools to provide opportunities for our pupils of today and tomorrow.

I chose Europass Teacher Academy as a course provider based on my earlier positive experience with them. Recently, in the post-Covid era they embarked on a massive expansion setting up Study Centres and Studios all over Europe with Florence as their headquarter. They have a rather well evolved management structure and a marketing and training programme development team in place. They are very busy in the online space and offer about 700 courses for teachers in 27 locations. They partnered up for example with Szent István University from Hungary too.

They work with travel agencies for Saturday cultural and tour options. We took a Tuscany in one Day bus tour, and it wasn’t far from the truth. We left Florence at 8 am and got back at 9pm having visited other regional cities of excellence such as Siena (famous for its horse race called Palio), San Gimignano (famous for its 7 towers) and Pisa (famous for the leaning tower). We also went to wine tasting in a canteen in Poggio dei Laghi village situated in the world-famous Chianti wine region.

This was my second time with them in Florence, in the city of unparalleled natural and manmade beauty and richness, known and admired for its art, architecture and sculpture but also for its leather and parfum shops.

This time we were in a different location that also belongs to Europass, in via dei  Rustici. The classrooms inside this three-story inner-city building are spacious, giving place to a maximum of 15 people and many of the courses were overbooked due to high demand. It means that we were split into a 14 and a 10-member group. My group was the smaller one with 3 Portuguese pre-school teachers, 5 Croatian teaching staff from a culinary and catering vocational school in Pula, Istria. One German colleague could not make it due to the travel chaos hitting German airports in the run up to the summer holiday season, so we were 9 in a classroom with our teacher trainer, Levente from Hungary.

The training itself span over the week, from 9 am to 2 pm from Monday to Friday and the last day, Saturday was dedicated to the cultural round tour in the picturesque region of Tuscany.

The training started with the usual ice breaking activities based on questions to get to know each other better and to create a certain level of cohesion between the participants. Then, we were given workbooks to work from whereas the teacher used his ppts projected to the overhead TV screen.  

We began the course by making sense of the main topic, conflicts that can arise between students in the classroom, and also between parents, teachers, and administrative staff and talked about the possible sources of conflict (Gray and Stark, 1984):

• Limited resources
• Interdependent work activities
• Differentiation of activities
• Communication problems
• Differences in perceptions
• The environment of the organisation.

The types of conflict can be affective-emotional, cognitive- opinion based, behavioural- actions based, goal conflict of different outcomes and the interrelated conflicts which are all of these together.  As a natural outcome of this part we talked about conflict resolution strategies such as negotiation and mediation. Mediation involves a 3^rd person, negotiation on the other hand should respond to three objectives:

• Identification of differences between the parties
• Making joint decisions
• Building a commitment to resolve the conflict

When resolving a given conflict we are advised to focus on the problem, not on the personalities involved. One should be courteous but without sugar coating the problem. It is also important to keep our conversations or decisions strictly confidential and come up with a resolution together with the participants. We also talked about building and strengthening relationships with our students to be able to act quicker in either preventing or resolving conflicts with more success. Skilfully practiced active listening can also be a great help, so we conducted exercises in pairs how to maintain eye contact, be attentive, patient, keeping an open mind without interrupting the other person.

The other main topic up for discussion was bullying in the school. At this point it is important to differentiate about teasing and bullying. In teasing for example, the target doesn’t mind it, or it is reciprocal and done for fun by definition. In bullying the target feels badly or embarrassed to say the least, and it is intended to cause harm. We carried out exercises in the workbook to recognise early signs of it such as Verbal, Relational, Physical, Cyber and Sexual in nature. We learned how to identify warning signs indicating that someone is being bullied or somebody is becoming a bully. We also discussed the possible reasons of bullying specifically in our school types (high school, vocational school, pre-school) and the forms of cyberbullying. In this latter the role of the school and teachers is inevitable to prevent cliques in our classroom and build community spirit instead to have cooperative vs competitive classrooms. Finally, we defined the members of the bullying circle: possible defenders, supporters, bystanders, defenders, bullies and targets.

On Friday, before receiving our course certificates we were given a closing task to design anti-bullying posters and present them that we could use in our school as well.

I have to emphasise the outstanding importance of the support of the European Commission who has funded this mobility through Erasmus+, for which I am truly grateful.

This mobility was funded by the European Commission.

The information presented here does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

Here you can find our ever-expanding Erasmus page on our Avicenna website:  https://avicenna.hu/erasmus/