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School Bullies: A Little Philosophy For Children Can Go A Long Way - Honolulu Civil Beat

Education

School Bullies: A Little
Philosophy For Children Can
Go A Long Way
Ethnic studies, p4c program foster safe
learning environments in Hawaii schools.
By Nathan Eagle   / July 31, 2012

 Reading time: 6 minutes.

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Editor’s Note: This is the second story of an occasional series on bullying inHawaii schools. Bullying is more of a problem in Hawaii than in many otherstates yet Hawaii officials struggle to address it.
Hawaii school officials may be reluctant to talk about the state’s stunningstatistics on bullying, but teachers say effective programs have beenunearthed that could serve as models for the rest of the district.
Philosophy for Children, which promotes peace in the classroom, is one
example. Kailua High School and Waikiki Elementary have successfully
deployed it and educators point at a profound shift in the learning
environment over the past decade.
Chad Miller, Hawaii’s 2012 Teacher of the Year, said when he started working
at Kailua, fights were a weekly occurrence. Eight years later, he said fighting
on campus has become rare.
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School Bullies: A Little Philosophy For Children Can Go A Long Way - Honolulu Civil Beat

“Bullying is what we see, but the problem is below the surface,” Miller said.
“It’s this lack of skills.”
Mental Health America of Hawaii Executive Director Marya Grambs shares
those sentiments. The Honolulu-based nonprofit aims to find healthy ways
for kids to handle bullying and for adults to prevent it.
“There’s a knee-jerk reaction to just punish the bully. That’s so scary,” shesaid. “Yeah, they’re doing really bad things but there’s usually a reason why.”
Ben Lukey serves as a Philosopher in Residence through a partnership with
the University of Hawaii. While he primarily focuses on developing thePhilosophy for Children program at Waikiki and Kailua, over the past couple
years he has taken it to interested teachers at other schools around theisland like Mililani High and Kuhio Elementary.
“It’s not about just creating an anti-bullying program,” he said. “In the social
pipe of bullying, it’s difficult to follow a script. You’ve got to try to create
opportunities where the students see each other as people and not astargets.”
Mental Health America’s Stop Youth Suicide and Bullying Project has trained
adults and kids since 2007 to raise awareness and teach prevention andintervention skills. The nonprofit is motivated in part by statistics that show ateen in Hawaii is more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as a teenelsewhere in the United States; bullying is often cited as the reason.
Grambs said part of the solution could come from Hawaii incorporating antibullying concepts into the curriculum. This is what Kailua High School andWaikiki Elementary have done, though not to specifically address bullying.
“Education should be about creating good people, not good test-takers,”
Miller said. “I think we’ve lost that focus. It’s a national issue.”‘Everyone Coming Together’
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1/12/22, 4:20 PMSchool Bullies: A Little Philosophy For Children Can Go A Long Way - Honolulu Civil Beat

The Philosophy for Children program, or p4c as it’s commonly called, is aworldwide movement. It strives to build an intellectually safe community
based on four pillars: community, inquiry, philosophy and reflection.
Student engagement is key, Miller said; the kids need to feel comfortable inthe classroom to share their thoughts on the subject at hand. The program
helps students develop skills that foster mutual respect and inquisitiveminds, he added.
“I don’t think anyone wants to be a bully,” Miller said. “So we need to create
environments where kids learn to think responsibly and empathetically.”
The ethnic studies program at Kailua High School works in conjunction with
p4c to create intellectually safe environments. The school of roughly 900
students is over half Native Hawaiian, 11 percent White, 10 percent Filipino, 9percent Japanese and 4 percent Samoan, according to 2011 enrollment data.
Oahu native Amber Makaiau helped develop and teach the course. Usingsome initial seed money, a pilot program was developed. What started as anelective became a required class to graduate, the only one of its kind in thecountry.
“It’s a dramatically different place than it was 10 years ago, but it’s taken thewhole of everyone coming together and being on the same page,” said
Makaiau, who last year won the Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence inCulturally Responsive Teaching.
This comes at a time when other states hesitate to teach ethnic studies.
Arizona, for instance, won’t give schools millions of dollars in state money ifthey teach ethnic studies, claiming it promotes resentment toward a class ofpeople.
Aside from incorporating p4c concepts in every class and requiring theethnic studies course, Makaiau said Kailua High School has successfullytransformed due to strong parent collaboration. She said it was thecommunity that identified the issue — not bullying in so many words, but thehttps://www.civilbeat.org/2012/07/16676-school-bullies-a-little-philosophy-for-children-can-go-a-long-way/

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School Bullies: A Little Philosophy For Children Can Go A Long Way - Honolulu Civil Beatneed to improve conflict resolution skills to reduce violence — that led to thechange.
The school stepped up with a financial lift from a federal grant, state funding
and nonprofits. Teacher training and community meetings ensued and aculturally appropriate ethnic studies course was born.
“We knew it had to be unique to the kids at our schools, not some cut-andpaste bullying program,” said Makaiau, who’s out on maternity leave. “Theseare the types of programs that become embedded, part of the school
culture, not some passing fad.”Like Miller, she said it’s all about how people relate to one another. The
course teaches kids how to be aware and responsible for the language they
use with one another, but also inquire within to examine personal biases.
Makaiau has had some students, for instance, who on the first day of classare yelling profanities across the room at other kids.
“That’s how they’re relating to one another, but they learn some rules on
how we engage each other and I’ve seen tremendous growth,” she said.
“We create a safe place where we can talk about issues, such as if it’s OK for
men to hit women or what it means to be local. By the end of the year, I’ve
had kids say, ‘I’ve really become aware of how I have these negative
assumptions about white people,’ for instance.”
The first day of class this school year at Kailua was Monday. Miller, whoteaches English, said he plans to spend the first three days discussing
intellectual safety with his freshmen and seniors. After defining the term
Tuesday, Wednesday’s lesson will focus on examples.
“We talk about what it is and isn’t,” he said. “Making fun of someone is notintellectually safe. Nor is anything that’s taking away from listening, like
updating your Facebook status on your phone or chatting to the person next
to you. That’s saying you don’t value my ideas or me as a person.”https://www.civilbeat.org/2012/07/16676-school-bullies-a-little-philosophy-for-children-can-go-a-long-way/

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School Bullies: A Little Philosophy For Children Can Go A Long Way - Honolulu Civil Beat

This is a concept teachers return to throughout the year.
“If classrooms aren’t intellectually safe, then I don’t think real learning canhappen,” Miller said.
Makaiau said it’s important to understand that a single program or class can’ttransform a school; it’s all those working parts coming together that makes
the difference.
“The whole school has to be on board with whatever this program is about
and practice it in the classroom,” she said. “Then once you transform theculture in the schools, you transform the culture at-large. The schools are justmirrors of the culture.”

About the Author
Nathan Eagle   Nathan Eagle is a deputy editor for Civil Beat. You can reachhim by email at neagle@civilbeat.org or follow him on Twitterat @nathaneagle, Facebook here and Instagram here.
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