PREVENTING BULLYING: A Manual for Teachers in Promoting Global Educational Harmony by Raju Ramanathan and Christina Theophilos is extremely well-intentioned. Tackling the escalating rise in ‘bullying’ as currently defined within educational systems is certainly a worthy goal. Constructed of four main sections with plenty of hands-on activities, the cartoon and chart illustrations are informative as well as fun, yet the legal disclaimer is lengthy…and perhaps with good reason. Here’s one main problem: while new realities like cyber-bullying have surely added additional forms of persecution to the school yard/school halls/online pot, there are likely a number of educators and parents who still might find it debatable whether there is actually more bullying going on in schools in the U.S. now, for example, than say during the era of Jim Crow laws. It’s just that the ongoing torment experienced by African Americans, plus other multicultural/immigrant students wasn’t called ‘bullying’ at that time, nor was it yet identified by its real name: systemic ‘racism’.
As a resource reference that purports to represent as well as guide educators towards the safety and harmonious fair treatment of all students, PREVENTING BULLYING is in places sadly written from a very Caucasian-centric, hetero-normative point of view featuring, for instance, post-activity discussion questions such as: “How do you think it feels to be disrespected? Imagine you were: poor, disabled, gay, colored…do you think it’s a choice or easy to change?” Wording questions in this way conveys the erroneous assumption that most students who will be participating in the recommended anti-bullying exercises will NOT be poor, differently-abled, LGBT, or people of color, when nothing could be further from the truth. Yet it would have been easy to more carefully craft such questions by just asking students to imagine being someone other than who they are, rather than reinforcing the marginalization of certain populations. (NOTE: the term ‘colored’ to indicate African American or biracial people has not been used in polite, respectful conversation since the late 1960s.) An additional flaw resides around children who may act out as ‘bullies’ due to being victims of emotional/physical/sexual abuse. A number of recommendations towards handling this prevalent, multi-faceted societal issue are woefully simplistic, when not offering less-than-helpful advice/exercises outright. Imagine, for instance, being a kid for whom the answer to the inquiry “Who do you trust most in this world and why?” might be: no one. Without an environment’s adequate ability to deal with what may consequently come up for that child, such innocently posed, good-hearted questions may wind up doing more harm than good.
PREVENTING BULLYING by Raju Ramanathan and Christina Theophilos is a heartfelt attempt to address worthy concerns that would benefit hugely from a thorough sensitivity rewrite.
~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader