Recently, the International Conference held in Lieges, Belgium on Practices and Competences to Fight School Bullying at the Helmo Sainte Croix School, presented the final report drafted by the project partners of Sonet-Bull - Practices and Competences in Dealing with Bullying in School during the first six months of the project. Partners include Dublin City University, Hellenic Open University, Fondazione Mondo Digitale, Computer Technology Institute & Press Diophantus and Inforef.
The objective was to analyse how bullying is defined legislatively in the various project countries, what policies are implemented and what the best strategies are to prevent and contrast bullying in school.
The full text of the Report on Practices and Competences in Dealing with Bullying in School Communities can be downloaded from the resources are (publications section) of the project website: www.sonetbull.eu.
Project Manager Annaleda Mazzucato [@AnnaledaM], who participated in the international conference on behalf of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, explained how the meetings and joint work revealed the lack of understanding for this phenomenon by many of the involved actors.
“Both parents and other actors in the school community do not have the necessary skills to implement either preventive educational strategies or help victims and bullies. Parents, headmasters and teachers are not capable of recognizing bullying, confronting it and, in most cases, are not aware of current legislation on this phenomenon. The expulsion of the bully is the most usual solution. Moreover, we never take into consideration the social impact of adopting wrong strategies,” explains Ms. Mazzucato.
The lack of political interest and of guidelines to help teachers, headmasters and parents to identify, denounce and support the causes and consequences of bullying led the project partners to discuss the development of a training programme for actors in the school community and parents, based on a peer learning methodology and the use of new technology.
During the course of the research, partners identified a set of key skills that are necessary to implement strategies to prevent and contrast bullying and jointly developed a training programme for school actors based on these key skills and European best practices.
“Over the course of the coming months, with the active involvement of schools in Italy, Greece, Ireland and Belgium,” explains Annaleda Mazzucato, “our partners will experiment with these training modules, working with parents, headmasters, teachers and psychologists on the didactic materials. The on-line programme (the platform is currently being developed) will be available to anyone who wishes to learn how to apply European best practices to contrast and prevent bullying.”
The platform will also provide the opportunity to create discussion groups, exchange materials, etc.
