Acting Against Bullying: Using Drama and Peer Teaching to Reduce Bullying
Source: Bullying Special Edition Contributor
Topics: Bullying and Teasing, Bullying Topics, School Bullying Prevention
Before I did AAB, I didn’t know how to deal with a situation when I got into it so I got like - I didn’t think about what I was doing and about the consequences of what I was doing and about how it would make other people feel. Since doing AAB people have said that whenever I get into fights and stuff, which sometimes I do, that I’ve dealt with it in a more mature way and it hasn’t got me into so much trouble as before. (Year 9 student)
What is Acting Against Bullying?
Acting Against Bullying (AAB) is a program which uses a combination of two key strategies:drama and peer teaching. This occurs across the whole school, with every student actively involved, and within the curriculum. The aim is to give students themselves both the understanding and some of the tools to deal with bullying – and other forms of conflict - in schools. This empowerment of the students as individuals then has the potential to allow them to change the ethos of their schools.
n spite of years of effort, research shows that levels of school bullying remain remarkably constant, and that virtually all students worry about bullying and conflict (1, 2). We take a fairly standard definition of conflict as clashes of interests, rights or power, or through misunderstanding, and of bullying as the ongoing abuse of an imbalance of power and/or status (3). This is particularly relevant for this program, since schools are places where