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PRE 798 Bullying Prevention and Intervention: A Social Climate Perspective- Fall 2014
Line #: 24422
Instructor: Robert G. Harrington, Ph.D.
Office: 630 JR Pearson Hall
Phone: 785-864-9709 (O)
Email: (PREFERRED)
FAX: 785-832-9532 (HOME)
Course Location: ONLINE, Blackboard, No On-Campus Meetings
Description of the Course: PRE 798 Bullying: Prevention and Intervention is a special graduate level course offering that is being offered this Fall, 2014. It is the only course on bullying at KU, in Kansas and in the Midwest. The course is being offered in response to the recent Kansas State Legislation that requires all schools in the state of Kansas to have a bullying policy and a prevention and intervention plan in place withtheir respective school districts. Since incidents of bullying are of interest to individuals in many other settings besides schools, including the workplace, universities, residential institutions, sports, and among individuals of all ages and positions in life, students from many backgrounds should find this course interesting.
Bullying is a pervasive problem. It happens in schools, homes, in workplaces. Bullying is all about power and intimidation over another individual. In this course you will discover that there are many forms of bullying. You will find that the path to becoming a bully is not always a clear one. There are many routes to becoming a bully.You also will find that while individuals may be bullied for many different reasons there are some features that they have in common as victims. Finally the third ingredient in the bullying social network is the bystander. Bystanders are the individuals who witness what just happened between the bully and the intended victim. The bystander has the chance toprevent or intervene in the bullying event. Sometimes they choose to intervene and sometimes individuals or groups of bystanders choose to do nothing or even participate in the bullying of another individual. By the end of this course you will understand why this is so.
What makes a person grow into a bully? What are some predisposing factors from development, personality, social environment, biology, mental health, parenting, societal mores, and the general climate of a school, and a nation that contribute to bullying? Can we predict who will become a bully?
Wouldn’t it be great if we knew about how bullies operate? How they think? What their rewards for bullying behavior might be? Olweus has devoted his life to discovering just such factors in decades of study on bullying. We will take a look at the available research on bullies, victims and bystanders.
There is much emphasis on boys as bullies. Is male bullying the same as bullying among girls? What are the motivations of boys versus girls to bully? How do they go about it?
What are the outcomes? We will discover firsthand what it is like to be a female bully and a female victim of a bully. I think that you will enjoy the comparison between boys and girls. Since this is a class populated mostly by females I think that you will find it personally interesting as well.
What can schools do to prevent bullying in their schools? What can parents do to be supportive of the efforts of schools in bullying prevention? There is a role for both in a school-wide bullying prevention program.
How should schools and other institutions intervene in cases of bullying? Does one size fit all? Should all bullies be expelled or suspended? Should there be a role for counseling, social skills development, peer mediation? What does the research say works for intervening with bullies? Can individual teachers/ counselors and other professionals be effective in intervening with bullies or does it take an institution-wide effort to changesocial climate?
How can an individual professionals be more successful in preventing and intervening in cases of classroom bullying? We will learn how bullying destroys the classroom learning communityand social climateand what professionals can do to deal with it on their own, with the support of their institutions and with the support of external resources, such as law enforcement, counseling services and parent training.
In the end, my goal is to awaken your awareness of what bullying is in all its forms. I hope to introduce you to the research that has been done in this area. I hope to give you some ideas about how to identify a bully, a victim, and bystanders. I hope to help you to understand how a bullying policy is developed. For those of you who might be more interested in workplace bullying and bullying in higher educationI hope to help you accomplish similar goals in the workplace.
In addition to issues of prevention and intervention with bullying I hope to help you understand the issues associated with various forms of bullying including: cyber-bullying, workplace bullying, LBGTQ bullying, criminal bullying, male v. female bullying, hazing, parental – child bullying, teacher bullying, bullying in the academy, and other forms of bullying which you may be interested.
I want you to be familiar with the Kansas State legislation on Bullying in Schools and I want you to be familiar with school and university policies on safety and bullying. Our goal is to make you aware of your responsibilities in cases of bullying, how to recognize it, how to prevent it and how to intervene when it happens. In addition, I want you to see that by changing the social climate of an institution you can have a tremendous impact on bullying.
A Social Climate Perspective on Bullying Prevention and InterventionSustainability Focused Faculty Development Workshop, May 19 and 20, 2014
In May 2014 I was selected to participate in a Sustainability Focused Faculty Development Workshop. I am very interested in “sustainability” not only in the traditional manner in which it is thought of but also in a more non-traditional manner as well, but yet a perspective on “sustainability that is recognized and in much need of attention in the area in which I teach and research-SOCIALSUSTAINABILITY. This course will have a decided social climate aspect associated with our understanding of bullying and how to prevent and intervene when it happens. With that in mind, I thought it would be helpful right at the start of the course to include right in the syllabus some substantial information about sustainability in general and school social climate in particular. Here goes.
Sustainability - Definition
Sustainability is an economic, social, and ecological concept. It is intended to be a means of configuring civilization and human activity so that society and its members are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in the present, while preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystems, and planning and acting for the ability to maintain these ideals indefinitely. Sustainability affects every level of organization, from the local neighborhood, school district, university, workplace, to the entire globe. It is a sometimes controversial topic.
Put in simpler terms, sustainability is providing for the best for people and the environment both now and in the indefinite future. In the terms of the 1987 Brundtland Report, sustainability is:
"Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."
This is very much like the "seventh generation" philosophy of the Native American Iroquois Confederacy, mandating that Chiefs always consider the effects of their actions on their descendants through the seventh generation in the future.
The original term was "sustainable development," a term adopted by the Agenda 21 program of the United Nations. Some people now object to the term "sustainable development" as an umbrella term since it implies continued development, and insist that it should be reserved only for development activities. "Sustainability", then, is nowadays used as an umbrella term for all of human activity.
Types of sustainability
Institutional sustainability: i.e. can the strengthened institutional structure continue to deliver the results of the technical cooperation to the ultimate end-users? The results may not be sustainable if, for example, the planning unit strengthened by the technical cooperation ceases to have access to top-management or is not provided with adequate resources for the effective performance after the technical cooperation terminated;
Economical and financial sustainability: i.e. can the results of the technical cooperation continue to yield an economic benefit after the technical cooperation is withdrawn? For example, the benefits from the introduction of new crops may not be sustained, if the constraints to marketing the crops are not resolved. Similarly, economic (distinct from financial) sustainability may be at risk, if the end-users continue to depend on heavily-subsidized activities and inputs.
Ecological sustainability: i.e. are the benefits to be generated by the technical cooperation likely to lead to a deterioration in the physical environment (thus indirectly contributing to a fall in production) or well-being of the groups targeted and their society?
Social Sustainabilityis the least defined and least understood of the three pillars of sustainability and sustainable development and the one that I am most interested in and that has the most relevance to the topic of bullying prevention and intervention. The triad of Environmental Sustainability, Economic Sustainability, and Social Sustainability is widely accepted as a model for addressing sustainability, yet the social aspect has had considerably less attention in public dialogue. The concept of Social Sustainability encompasses such topics as: social equity, livability, health equity, community development, social capital, social support, human rights, labor rights, placemaking, social responsibility, social justice, cultural competence, community resilience, and human adaptation.
According to the Western Australia Council of Social Services (WACOSS)[1]:
"Social sustainability” occurs when the formal and informal processes; systems; structures; and relationships actively support the capacity of current and future generations to create healthy and livable communities. Socially sustainable communities are equitable, diverse, connected and democratic and provide a good quality of life."
Another definition has been developed by Social Life, a UK based social enterprise specializing in place based innovation (originally set up by the Young Foundation). For Social Life, social sustainability is "a process for creating sustainable, successful places that promote wellbeing, by understanding what people need from the places they live, learn and work. Social sustainability combines design of the physical realm with design of the social world – infrastructure to support social and cultural life, social amenities, systems for citizen engagement and space for people and places to evolve."[1]
Social Life has developed a framework for social sustainability which has four dimensions: amenities and infrastructure, social and cultural life, voice and influence, and space to grow.[2]
Nobel Laureat Amartya Sen gives the following dimensions for social sustainability [2]:
Equity - the community provides equitable opportunities and outcomes for all its members, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community
Diversity - the community promotes and encourages diversity
Interconnected/Social cohesions - the community provides processes, systems and structures that promote connectedness within and outside the community at the formal, informal and institutional level
Quality of life - the community ensures that basic needs are met and fosters a good quality of life for all members at the individual, group and community level (e.g. health, housing, education, employment, safety)
Democracy and governance - the community provides democratic processes and open and accountable governance structures.
Maturity - the individual accept the responsibility of consistent growth and improvement through broader social attributes (e.g. communication styles, behavioural patterns, indirect education and philosophical explorations)
The general definition of social sustainability is the ability of a social system, such as a country or an educational system, to function at a defined level of social well-being indefinitely. That level should be defined in relation to the goal of Homo sapiens, which is (or should be) to optimize quality of life for those living in the social system and their descendants.
After that there is universal disagreement on what quality of life goals should be. Not only do nations disagree. So do their political parties, their religions, their cultures, their classes, their activists organizations, and so on.
Therefore we will not attempt to define what quality of life goals should be, even in the broadest sense. This means that social sustainability on a practical, implementable basis is undefined. Thus it's the weakest pillar of them all because people can't even agree on which way is up. This is a shame, because a strong social pillar is the topmost goal of democratic systems.
A possible direction for agreement on what the tangible goals of social sustainability should be may be found in Bhutan's national goal of optimizing “gross national happiness.”
Do you ever wonder why the sustainability problem is so impossibly hard to solve? It's because of the phenomenon of “change resistance.” The system itself, and not just individual social agents, is strongly resisting change. Why this is so, its root causes, and several potential solutions are presented below.
Analysis is the breaking down of a problem into smaller, easier to solve problems. Exactly how this is done determines the strength of your analysis.
You will see powerful techniques used in this analysis that are missing from what mainstream environmentalism has tried. This explains why a different outcome can be expected.
The key techniques of SYSTEM ANALYSIS are proper subproblem decomposition and root cause analysis. Let’s get started in understanding social change.
The Universal Causal Chain
Causal chain
This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: suspend bullies and counsel victims and do not think about bystanders. This leads to using superficial solutions such as one, two and three day suspensions for bullying in schools. Low leverage points of analysis (suspend the bully) are being used to resolve intermediate causes that are even more fundamental (problems at home; mental health challenges, social affirmation by the bystanders for the bully).
Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, whereas the complete causal chain runs to root causes. Why do bullies do what they do and what can we do to prevent and intervene? It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like suspension should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes. We have evidence of this state since suspensions for bullying are the most common remediation but bullies keep bullying under these conditions. Suspension does not solve the root cause of the bullying problem.
In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden basis of the problem. Further analysis finds the basis of causal chain. Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create a solution which solves the “real” problem.
How to Overcome Change Resistance
Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.
Step One: Complete sub-problem analysis
Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other sub-problems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, efforts to solve the other higher order sub-problems are largely wasted effort.
The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace of the school; for example, no bullying policies and no attempt to find a better mousetrap, other than suspension. Too many teachers, parents, and students are being deceived into thinking social sustainability is a low priority and that it need not be improved immediately.
The leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception by educating the populace or stakeholders: Administrators, Teacher, Students, and Parents about Bullying Prevention and Intervention. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false concepts such as “boys will be boys” and “girls are just mean” because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.
Step Two: Complete Sub-problem Analysis
“Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.”
In the social sustainability problem, schools and departments of education are making limited decisions to their own advantage which do not address the entirety of the problem. So, for example, schools are pushed to have students excel academically at the expense of their social and emotional development. They do not recognize that they are in the business of educating the ENTIRE STUDENT including intellect, achievement, personality, social, emotional, motor, language, and adaptive skils.
The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. Schools claim that they just do not have enough time to deal with bullying in their schools or they just deny that they have any bullying at all as a convenient excuse for not dealing with the problem of bullying. The current goal of education is the maximization of standardized test scores, while the goal of the school as a social institution is the optimization of quality of life, for those living within the school system. Guess which side is losing? That is right; the students and the social system of the school.