Working to eradicate bullying in schools: professors Deborah Dysart-Gale and Gilbert Émond and students Simranjot Kaur, Alvin deViller, Ebtehaj Alyamani, Hadeel Al-Maimani and Vishal Handa. | Photo credit: Richard Burnett
The Action Against Bullying Innovation Team — whose members are engineering students Simranjot Kaur, Alvin deViller, Ebtehaj Alyamani, Hadeel Al-Maimani and Vishal Handa — developed different solutions for different age groups, including day-long workshops, videos and presentations.
The project recommends “one week of basic bullying, social, psychological and philosophy education per year starting at the kindergarten level. The education advances and increases in depth. In high school they analyse severe criminal, sexual and suicidal case studies.”
Bringing it to schools
“We started talking to teachers and guidance counsellors and parents, and we also looked online: a few guidance counsellors had blogs with information,” says Alvin deViller. “We identified a few problems, but there was one main problem that all the others were centred on: kids growing up from an early age are not educated well — or at all — about bullying.”
DeViller knows of what he speaks: he used to bully other kids when he was younger. “I was bullied a little bit and became a bully myself when I was a little kid,” says the Ottawa native.
“You see people who are cool, and you don’t know how to fit in, so you join them making fun of other people so that you are part of a group,” he says. “But then I saw how bullying affected people like my sister and a few friends who now have agoraphobia and extreme anxiety.”
Ebtehaj Alyamani, who was not bullied when she grew up in Saudi Arabia, says, “What makes me passionate about this project is trying to make people have confidence in themselves.”
Hadeel Al-Maimani, also from Saudi Arabia, says, “When I was younger, I was with a group of friends in school who bullied people. We didn’t think what we were doing was bullying because there is not an awareness of it there as there is here in Canada.”
“When I did a research paper on social media for a class at Concordia, I discovered the horrible harm of cyberbullying, and that is what made me want to develop this project,” Al-Maimani says. “It is something I would like to see introduced in schools in Saudi Arabia.”
“Many people don’t know about bullying or its causes,” says Simranjot Kaur, who grew up in India. “Bullying does not even exist in their minds. My interest in stopping bullying came from this.”
Team member Vishal Handa, who also grew up in India, says he was bullied for six years beginning in sixth grade. “Those were intense years for me because it would happen for six or seven hours each day. They used to call me really bad names, and once there was a physical assault,” says Handa.
“It affected my learning capabilities, my confidence, my self-esteem, and most importantly it had an effect on my public speaking. What I realize now is had there been an education curriculum in my home country to tackle these issues — to help bullies understand what they are doing is wrong and having a bad effect on people like me — it would have been really helpful,” he says.
“That’s why I am involved, and would like to see this project applied back home.”
Embracing the idea
The first step is to see how their project — officially named Engineers Against Bullying — can be improved to better meet the needs of schools. The team has met with Concordia’s Office of Community Engagement.
“What we have here is a group of people very passionate about taking this forward. It would be about finding the proper Concordia resources to connect and bringing this project to the next level,” Dysart-Gale says.
She points out that projects like this are perfectly aligned with the Concordia philosophy. “One of the university’s new strategic directions is to ‘Embrace the city, embrace the world’, and this is a really good example of a student project that could engage a bunch of Concordians making a positive impact in the city,” Dysart-Gale says.
The five students who formed Engineers Against Bullying have also impressed Gilbert Émond, a Concordia associate professor in the Department of Applied Human Sciences. Émond is author of the landmark 2007 study L’homophobie, pas dans ma cour! for GRIS-Montréal, whose mission is to ensure an increased awareness of homosexual and bisexual realities in the school system.
He happily agreed to be a consultant on the Engineers Against Bullying project. “I am so proud of these students,” Émond says.
“Anti-bullying education is incredibly important. Communication is our goal, so that we can build a better world together, a better society. We cannot ignore bullying, and this project offers schools a way to quantify and qualify what they can do to make an anti-bullying policy a reality.”