Antiviolence class teaches how to be really cool
The Owning Up curriculum delves into the world of teen angst and peer pressure at Buchanan Middle School.
By ELIZABETH MILLER
Published September 25, 2005
LUTZ - The bell rings and the sixth-graders at Buchanan Middle School change classes. Some go to math or English, while others will head to a new class where they can talk about one of their favorite topics: who's hot and who's not!
This unusual curriculum includes which girl thinks she's "all that" and which kid thinks it's cool to harass the nerd.
Owning Up is an antiviolence curriculum that has been implemented in Washington, D.C., and brought to Buchanan Middle School for a test run.
The curriculum was developed by Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees & Wannabes, which identifies teen angst as real and offers tips for dealing with adolescent issues. The book was adapted to the popular movie, Mean Girls, to which many of the girls in the Owning Up class at Buchanan could relate.
While not allowed to talk about fellow students specifically, they look at each other knowingly, referencing the movie and the term Queen Bee as though it could have taken place at their school.
For this class, they don't have to study or take notes to understand what the teacher is talking about. What is a clique? What does it mean to be popular? How do you feel if you're not one of the popular kids?
The girls don't have to look very far for answers. The class is interactive and the teacher is the one taking notes on what the students are telling her. Angelique Walker, the program's director, scribbles their answers in red marker on poster-sized paper.
She puts traits of a popular girl in the center of the paper. On the outskirts, she writes the traits of a girl who's not popular in blue. She proceeds to ask how they feel about the "red" girl. Ironically, most girls don't care for the traits of the "red" girl, yet, they all agree being popular is desirable and sets the tone for their school on what's cool and what isn't.
The girls will continue to talk about their school's social structure and how to react to their friends and peers in different situations for the next 13 school days.
"The kids come up with solutions themselves," Walker says later. "You can see their faces as the light bulbs start coming on."
The goal of Owning Up is to deal with violence preventively by teaching kids how to deal with the stuff that's real for them like gossip, their reputations and bullying.
While not the most disorderly middle school in northern Hillsborough County, Buchanan last year fell into the top half, with 69 incidents of crime or violence reported to the Hillsborough County School District. Of those, 28 were fights.
"Most boys don't want to fight, but they feel like they have to or they'd be considered weak," said Ushanda Pauling, the Owning Up instructor for the separate boys' classes.
"When they've just come from a class where they all agree they don't want to fight, they may be able to walk away from a situation without it being indicative of how weak or cool they are."
Throughout the fall, all ten of the sixth-grade classes are going through the Owning Up curriculum. These 230 students will learn about friendship, body image, gender differences, reputations and other topics.
The class is just one component of a yearlong pilot program sponsored by the Ophelia Project of Tampa Bay. Ophelia, itself named for the bestseller Reviving Ophelia, received $150,000 from the Ounce of Prevention Fund of Florida to implement this program.
In addition to the Owning Up curriculum, the program includes parent and staff education, and student programming in the second half of the year.
Ophelia Project provided the Owning Up training to Buchanan's faculty and staff before the school year began. Plans are also in the works to get parents involved by providing educational seminars on how to help kids cope with social pressures.
Nanette Harvey, assistant principal at Buchanan, believes that the program is already making a difference by heading off disciplinary problems.
"By this time last year, we could easily have about 12 incidents in a day," she said. "Now we maybe see five in a day. Because the teachers have been trained to identify potentially dangerous situations, they have a better knowledge of how to deal with things."
Both Walker and Harvey say they are seeing a difference in the kids. Walker said that kids will come to her class and proudly tell her of incidents that have come up in the lunch room or the hallways and ways they've dealt with things differently.
"We had a situation just the other day where two kids were involved in an argument and both were visually upset with the way things were going," said Harvey, "but they talked through it as a group. It could have been much worse."
Many incidents of violence start over gossip or other seemingly petty behavior. But simple misunderstandings can often lead to larger confrontations.
"Gossip or ostracizing someone can literally ruin the life of an adolescent if they are a victim or target of that kind of behavior," said Cheryl Pollack, a director for the Ophelia Project.
The final segment of the program will take place during the second half of the school year. Students will have an option to be on a leadership team that takes on a violence prevention campaign for their school. The program will also bring a national speaker to Buchanan in February.
"We're hoping this pilot will be successful so we can obtain new funding for subsequent years, and we'll have a new model that can be replicated throughout the district and change the culture of middle schools," Pollack said.
"Violence is not indicative of socioeconomic status. Even if we see a 10 percent change, if we can see a change in the level of incidents, then we'll know how kids are responding."