Service Learning Observation

In a society where individuals are interconnected like never before through the use of social media, it is still all too easy to forget about others who struggle every day from the impact of bullying. People, most often school-aged students, suffer in silence as they are relentlessly tormented, with seemingly no helping hand in sight. This issue, which is all too common in educational settings, was what I chose to focus on throughout my service learning experience in both my observations and my activities. Bullying in any of its forms, whether it be sexual harassment, cyberbullying, or its “traditional” manifestation of generalized harassment, relates directly to the topic of health and one’s physical and mental wellbeing. The impacts of bullying
physical injuries resulting from a psychological condition). In order to address this issue of bullying, students I worked with at my service learning placement were tasked with creating a PowerPoint identifying why bullying is an issue and outlining a specific service project in which they, as a group, would work together to solve the problem. Overall, students decided to raise awareness about bullying in order to encourage their peers to not tolerate it. One group of students chose to create posters to display around the school, all of which exposed startling facts and statistics relating to the effects of bullying, while another chose to spark a campaign within the school that encouraged the use of the phrase “No Hate Here” among the student body, which symbolizes the intolerance of hate and bullying between students. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know if the projects had any impact on the amount of bullying in the school, but the activities my students and I partook in certainly raised awareness of the impacts of bullying and spread the message that harassment in any form will not be tolerated by a vast majority of the student