My Social Action Project

Social Action Plan Reflection

My Social Action Plan was to create awareness in bullying in the school that I was placed in. After talking to the students and after having a meeting with the school principal, a theme was discovered in the school and there was a need for the students to learn and to be made aware of bullying. I created awareness by teaching the students what bullying looks like and what they might not perceive as bullying could actually be bully. This created awareness and educated the learners what bullying is and to make them aware of stories of students in their school that have gone through bullying. This worked really well, and the students really engaged in this activity. Teaching them this, I could see that the students really engaged in what I had to teach them and a lot of the learners leant something new about bullying that they did not know yet. One of the activities was for them to write something nice about 5 different people in the classroom. This really united to classroom as the students wrote genuine and beautiful comments about others in their classroom. The school didn’t allow me to give pamphlets or papers to the teachers in fear that it would make the parents worry, instead they told me to rather put the pamphlets on the walls of the school and when parents walked in the school and had meetings, they got see that the students are being made aware of the issue of bullying. Personally I would have loved to incorporate the community and the parents more. Looking at all these activities, awareness was made in the school and from that the students now know what bullying look likes. It was effective in teaching most of the learners on what bullying is and how they can stop it and what they can’t say or can say.

One of the create benefits of this social action plan is that it did not just educate and change the students but it changed me in the way that I speak to people and how tend to treat those around me. I tend to sometimes joke with people, but what I have learned is that sometimes when I mean it as a joke, someone else will not take it as one. So it has changed the way that I speak to people and what I say to them. It has made more sensitive with what I say and do with people.

It didn’t just help me personally but it shaped me as a teacher. It has shown me what encouraging conversations look like and what I can say as a teacher that will uplift, encourage and help my students. It has also created awareness that this is an issue that nearly every child in the school has to deal with it sometime. It has shown me that I need to be ready to deal and confront this issue in my own classrooms one day and to help the students that have gone through it. It has shown me that as a teacher I need to be a supportive vessel to the students and to never break the students down, not even if it was just meant as a joke.

The benefit of this action was that it showed learners what bullying is. A lot of them know what bullying is but they didn’t know the effects that their words have on a student and they didn’t know that even though they sometimes don’t mean it as bullying at all, the student receiving it will see it bullying. From that the students now know what it looks like and they can apply it to their interaction with one another. Talking about the sustainability of the project will only be seen after a while. The amount of complaints and bullying incidents that occur at the school will show me how sustainable it was. One good thing is that the principal can now always use this lessons that I taught them as a reference point when dealing with bullying incidents.

All in all, the experience of teaching this to the learners was amazing. Seeing that I taught it to different age groups, I found that the order learners did not really care as much as the other grades. One grade that I think took the information really well was the Grade 6 learners. They understood what I was saying and I could see that for a lot of them it was really good for them to hear.