Tag: GLSEN

On Whose Shoulders: @GLSEN

Just when you thought this month’s series of posts was going to focus on singular writers, their individual texts, and how they influenced the writing of Building School 2.0 – bam, the unexpected.

In all seriousness, the good people of GLSEN work tirelessly to compile one of the most helpful, if not stark and sobering, data sets available on the lived experiences of our LQBTQ students.

GLSEN’s National School Climate Survey is one of the most complete accountings how our country and states are progressing in helping students walk through their compulsory school days without hearing being mocked for differences – real or perceived.

Beyond the Survey, though, GLSEN is also acting on its findings. From resources to start and support school-based Gay Straight Alliances to the Day of Silence and Ally Week, GLSEN is building tools and resources for LGBTQ students, teachers, and their allies to foster understanding, conversations, and change within schools so that everyone might have the chance to feel more comfortable in their own humanity.

While the book may only call out GLSEN’s work directly one or two times, the organization’s work toward its mission “…to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression” embodies the Ethic of Care.

'13 School Climate Survey Infographic

103/365 Bullying in Colorado: Part 7 of 7

This 7-part series will cover the history of bullying legislation and anti-bullying efforts within the state of Colorado beginning with the first definition of bullying by the Legislature in 2001.

What is to be Done?

The threat of bullying is visible. Schools with bullying cultures exhibit high rates of absenteeism, lower scores on academic exams, and reports from students of fear for their safety. Each news story that reports youth peer violence or teen suicide acts as a reminder of the work to be done. This series has worked to build an understanding of the policy, non-profit and academic work around issues of bullying in Colorado’s public schools. The State’s definition and reporting requirements around bullying are considered to be comparable to those of other states in the nation (Sacco, Baird, Silbaugh, Corredor, Casey, & Doherty, 2012; USDOE, 2011).

The law not only outlines a clear definition of bullying, but has been bolstered to include annual reporting requirements designed to longitudinally track incidents of bullying across Colorado’s schools as well. Additionally, the state has taken action to provide direct access for means of anonymously reporting bullying and channeling those reports to the proper authorities (CO, 16-15.8-101, 2007). Similarly, in the last decade, Colorado has seen an increase in non-profit activity aimed at stemming bullying in its schools. These efforts have provided financial support for school and community efforts (Colorado Trust, 2008; Colorado Legacy Foundation, 2011).

They have worked to bring the findings of their efforts to the public so that others involved in the work might benefit and avoid making early mistakes based on access to research that speaks specifically to the problem of bullying within Colorado schools.

At the national level, work has been done to provide a clear understanding of bullying within Colorado schools with protected classes (GLSEN, 2001) and across all youth populations (Levy et al., 2012; USDOE, 2011). These findings both point to a dire need for intervention if there is to be hope for making Colorado schools safe places of learning and community as well as speaking to which efforts and strategies have been successful across geographies.

At a more intimate level, social scientists have been working in individual schools to understand the cultures in which American youth are developing (Clark, 2007; Pascoe, 2011). They find a culture desperate for adult presence and a need for the adults already in learning spaces to be more mindful and caring in their language and actions. Their work puts a face on the numbers and statistics often attached to instances of bullying and the argument for greater efforts to fight it. Each of the pieces necessary to make a true and positive difference in the cultures and communities of Colorado schools is set in place.

The problem is identified and possible solutions have been tested and shared. The policy is in place to make these efforts central to the work of educators, and there is no lack of national data supporting such a focus.

Necessary now are two components. The first is a confluence of all of the above factors through an act of public will to make our schools safer. The second, and inevitable, component is the time it will take to move our schools from environments where students fear ridicule and harassment to spaces where they feel free, cared for, and accepted for who they are.

102/365 Bullying in Colorado: Part 6 of 7

This 7-part series will cover the history of bullying legislation and anti-bullying efforts within the state of Colorado beginning with the first definition of bullying by the Legislature in 2001.

Where is the Work Being Done?

Though the law established a state grant program for anti-bullying initiatives beginning in November 2011, as of this writing, no such office or program has been established. This is not to be taken as a lack of movement within the state toward responding to and preventing bullying. A number of state and national organizations have taken up the cause of keeping Colorado’s students safe in our schools and online.

Perhaps the most visible in Colorado is the work of the Colorado Legacy Foundation. In April of 2011, as 11-1254 was moving through the Legislature, the Legacy Foundation convened a Statewide Bullying Prevention Summit with the intent of learning from the experiences of efforts around the state and setting a way forward for eliminating bullying in Colorado schools. From that summit emerged “A Statewide Blueprint for Bullying Prevention.” This document draws from national and local findings from previous efforts and attempts to pull them all together toward a strategic vision.

Primarily, the document takes its framework from the 2011 “Best Practices in Bullying Prevention,” from the U.S. Departments of Education and Health And Human Services. The framework takes as its core tenets the following ten strategies:

  • Commit to provide leadership to create and sustain a positive, respectful school climate.
  • Form or identify an existing team to coordinate bullying prevention efforts.
  • Regularly assess and monitor school climate including the nature of bullying and effectiveness of bullying prevention efforts.
  • Garner staff, parent, and community support and build partnerships.
  • Establish or revise and enforce school policies and procedures related to best practices in bullying prevention and intervention.
  • Train all staff in bullying awareness, prevention, and appropriate intervention.
  • Increase active adult supervision in hot spots where bullying occurs.
  • Intervene immediately, consistently, equitably, and appropriately when bullying occurs.
  • Integrate time into academic and social activities for teaching students bullying prevention skills including awareness, responding, and reporting.
  • Continue to implement, monitor, and update bullying prevention efforts over time.

Not surprisingly, some version of these same strategies had been identified two years earlier in the results of the Colorado Trust’s program evaluation. The Trust’s learning curve had even identified possible bumps in the road such as their identification of parent and family involvement in anti-bullying work as extremely difficult.

Rather than taking the 10 strategies wholesale, the summit participants attempted a “frugal innovation” approach to changing school culture and behavior in the interest of preventing bullying. They identified three key strategies:

  1. Leverage existing state and district standards, data, and accountability structures,
  2. Build authentic partnerships with youth,
  3. Foster creative collaborations with families and community-based organizations.

From these three strategies, the Blueprint outlines specific activities schools and districts can implement to build stronger and safer community cultures. Not surprisingly, these activities and strategies include approaches that, like the Safe-2-Tell legislation, do not necessarily center around bullying behaviors, but take as their goal plotting a course to the kinds of communities that produce empathetic, active citizens rather than attempting to combat an unwanted behavior.

This preventative, proactive stance also aligns with the Colorado Trust’s concerns about the immovability of bullying attitudes and proclivities in high schools relative to elementary and middle schools. If schools and communities took the time to attend to positive behaviors early on, perhaps later-year bullying would no longer be a concern.

Nationally, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in partnership with the Born This Way Foundation have dedicated a significant amount of resources to accomplishing a task similar to the mission of Colorado’s Department of Education’s efforts to aggregate and disseminate the best practices in bullying prevention. In “Bullying in a Networked Era: A Literature Review” Berkman outlined not only strategies for combating bullying behavior in schools, but illuminated the norms around bullying as well.

Drawing on more than 100 studies of bullying behavior from across the country, the literature review successfully describes the context, participants, and norms surrounding bullying behavior. Unlike the Legacy Foundation or Colorado Trust efforts that identified bullying as a problem and then offer solutions, Levy et al. worked to help educators understand the structures that might be in place within their learning organizations that could contribute to bullying behavior including gender norms, socio-economic status and others.

In addition to the efforts above, scholars and academics have started focusing their research more intently on the study of school cultures and bullying behaviors. In his 2005 book Hurt: Inside the world of today’s teenagers, Chap Clark engages in an ethnographic study of adolescents within a single school district in order that he might better understand the cultural and social forces shaping younger generations.

Clark describes what he finds as a collection of lost, forgotten, and invisible children. While some of his work points toward a golden age fallacy, Clark interprets what he finds as an indication that the youth he encounters have been left alone or ignored by adults who might otherwise be taking an active role in their lives. Such an understanding is similar to the Legacy Foundation’s contention of the importance of adults in young people’s live modeling and explicitly teaching the value of standing up to injustice and bullying.

In her 2011 Dude You’re a Fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school, C.J. Pascoe reported findings similar to Clarks, describing students’ frequent usage of the term “fag” to demean their fellow classmates. Such language was encountered so frequently, Pascoe claimed, that it often appeared as though community members did not register its use.

Pascoe also reported a norm outside of Clark’s contention of neglect. She wrote that adults within the school where she conducted her study were also implicit in creating environments of heteronormativity and homophobia that led to or passively authorized students’ bullying behaviors.

Such a claim matches with the GLSEN (2011) survey results. Twenty-seven percent of GLSEN survey respondents reported regularly hearing “staff make negative remarks about someone’s gender expression, and 18 percent regularly heard school staff make homophobic remarks” (p. 1).

The work of Clark, Pascoe, and other researchers attempting to document the lives and cultures of American schools with the goal of understanding norms, bullying, and how they are shaped brings a more localized and personal understanding to the work of bullying prevention. Combined with the work of state and national organizations, this research can provide a fuller perspective of the causes, effects, and strategies of prevention surrounding bullying behavior.

98/365 Bullying in Colorado: Part 2 of 7

This 7-part series will cover the history of bullying legislation and anti-bullying efforts within the state of Colorado beginning with the first definition of bullying by the Legislature in 2001.

Colorado’s Opening Volley

While it was certainly present within the state prior to legislative mention, bullying was first mentioned in by the Colorado Legislature in 2001 with the passage of Senate Bill 01-080 (SB 01-080). This bill revised state statute 22-32-109.1 (2) by adding a new subparagraph which defined bullying in Colorado as “any written or verbal expression, or physical act or gesture, or a pattern thereof, that is intended to cause distress upon one or more students in the school, on school grounds, in school vehicles, at a designated school bus stop, or at school activities or sanctioned events. The school district’s policy shall include a reasonable balance between the pattern and the severity of such bullying behavior.”  This new subparagraph also instituted a requirement of schools’ Safe School Plans in that they would now need to include “a specific policy concerning bullying prevention and education.”

This initial legislative effort to address bullying can be characterized as a first try ample in good faith but insufficient in action. In its analysis, the USDOE stated, “[L]egislation that defines prohibited bullying behaviors, and specifies graduated and substantial sanctions, will often require extensive implementation procedures, such as reporting requirements, investigation, and procedures for implementing the sanction (e.g. expulsion)” (xvi).

Colorado’s 2001 measure defined the behaviors to be understood as bullying, but left specific sanctions to school or district level decision-makers with the only guidance that there should be a plan and it should include considerations of patterns and severity of bullying behaviors.

As it went into effect August 8, 2001, SB 01-080 made bullying a legally identified offense in Colorado schools and required schools to include plans to keep their students safe by preventing and educating them about bullying.

It did not identify means for or require the reporting of bullying incidents in schools, take steps to provide Colorado youth with an avenue to report bullying, or make any mention of the inclusion of research-based methods of bullying prevention.

Perhaps most disconcerting was the lack of any mention of protected classes within this initial bill, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Romer v. Evans in 1996 (517 U.S. 620) which allowed for the inclusion of protected classes in such legislation. Specifically of interest here were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth.

According to the results of the 2011 School Climate Survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), “56% of students who were harassed or assaulted in school never reported it to school staff, and 62% never told a family member about the incident. Among students who did report incidents to school authorities, only 34% said that reporting resulted in effective intervention by staff” (p. 1).

Such bullying reflects not only a hostile environment for these students, but the unwillingness to report such incidents to their families exemplifies the double isolation of this group of students as well. Doubtless, other instances of feelings of depreciated safety exist among students in other protected classes, but no statewide school-based statistics are available at this time.

In short, SB 01-080 took steps ostensibly intended to reduce bullying and increase student perceptions of their safety within Colorado schools, but did not take advantage of the Legislature’s full power nor did it move to help schools and districts understand specifics of what they could do to protect students.

75/365 The Harm We Do to LGBTQ Students in the Classroom is Often Unintended

While we can see the academic identities our students craft and have had crafted for them in our classrooms, we must remember their student selves are not their whole selves anymore than our teacher, administrator, counselor selves are our whole selves.

There are other facets of our students’ identities we must acknowledge even if we cannot know them. One such facet on which schools have historically fallen down is that of sexual orientation of its students and their families.

The schools we need are spaces welcoming of students of all sexual identities.

Acceptable in schools (though arguably still painfully underexamined) are discussions of race, socioeconomic status, and learning differences.

To illustrate the point, consider the last time you heard or participated in a conversatino around race in a school. Perhaps it was within history class, maybe it was a discussion in an English course, or it could have been a variable studied in statistics.

Silenced are conversations drawing on anything other than an opposite-sexed normalizing of sexual identities of students.

In her book Dude, You’re a Fag, C.J. Pascoe examines how schools work to re-enforce heteronormative thinking and the othering of queer youth.

Describing the implicit curriculum, Pascoe describes the classroom of one teacher she studied, Ms. Macallister, as a “shrine to heterosexuality,” and explained Macallister’s use of language rooted in the assumption that all of her students could relate to examples of opposite-sex coupling and ignored relevant examples which might speak to LGBTQ students or their families.

“She instead reinforced, with the help of the students, a narrative of heterosexuality that depends on a similar age of the two partners, involves the state sanction of that relationship, and encourages procreation as central to such a relationship,” Pascoe writes.

Ironic, too, is the fact that many educators would likely claim to be accepting of students of all sexual orientations, even taking on the moniker of ally to signify that their classrooms are safe spaces. The numbers, though, tell a story that perhaps the enacted beliefs in schools are not living up to those espoused by these open-minded teachers. According to the 2011 GLSEN School Climate Survey, “56.9% of students reported hearing homophobic remarks from their teachers or other school staff, and 56.9% of students reported hearing negative remarks about gender expression from teachers or other school staff.” While it’s possible that none of these utterances was made by teachers who considered themselves allies of LGBTQ students, it’s highly unlikely.

Creating a safe space for LGBTQ students means more than a sticker on the door and a showing of a selection of “It Gets Better” youtube videos. It means thinking about the language we use in our classrooms, monitoring and discussing the language students use with one another, and considering the messages sent by the artifacts we use in our teaching.

Many teachers may point to the conservative views of local communities or discomfort or awkwardness around making explicit an effort to shift a normalized belief. The answer to these teachers must be, “Be the adult in the room.”

We must remember that we are often the most powerful force for keeping our students safe in the classroom, that each time we let hurtful or careless language or acts go by un-examined or un-challenged, we indicate tacit agreement. The message of that agreement does not serve our students, no matter their sexual orientation, it speaks and shouts that it is acceptable to other those in our community and suggests some people are worth respecting and others aren’t because we do not care to understand who they are.

For those not ready to walk into the classroom and have a frank and open discussion of sexuality, some need for time and reflection is understandable. The key, though, and the immediate step that must be taken if you are not ready to start tomorrow is to stop doing and saying things that lead any students to feel as though they are less than. That, we can all do today.