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Bulletin
Board
The project
involved making of a bulletin board regarding the social
issue of 'bullying' by the clubhouse youth.
Duration:
03.2004 - 06.2004
Location: South Boston Computer
Clubhouse, MA, USA
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Activists:12
Facilitators:
In
the first few sessions, the kids and facilitators participated
in a group discussion and a community tour. Some of the issues
that came up during the tour were violence and bullying, racism,
garbage in parks and other public spaces and harassment by the
local police. The community was shot on a digital camera and
the movie of the tour was shown in one of the YAN event sessions
in the South Boston Computer Clubhouse. The issue of bullying
seemed to be the common choice amongst the participants as the
topic for the project. This seemed like a good topic to address
since it seemed to be a problem that was present in the Boys
and Girls Club as well as the in the outside community. It is
ironic that all of the time that the group was trying to address
the problem of bullying in the community, the members as a group
could not stop fighting, bickering and bullying amongst themselves.
There was a split mongst the participants because of issues
of color, economic status, popularity, coolness, introvertedness
and extrovertedness.The group had dwindled to 5 people.
It was decided to construct a bulletin board focusing on the
issue of bullying outside of the Computer Clubhouse. This 4'x8'
space would be used to establish a permanent YAN presence in
the Club and it was decided that the board would periodically
change its focus. That would be a good way to do an "easy" project
that would involve research and design.
The
construction of the bulletin board was complicated. It involved
some brainstorming and some internet research. At one point
the group was broken up into sub-groups to focus on specific
tasks.There was a design team and a research team. While the
kids worked on the bulletin board, there were many misunderstandings
between the groups over the dominance of one group on the design
of the board. These conflicts had to be resolved by the facilitators
by different conflict-resolution tactics in children. Following
is a website that was consulted by the facilitators to resolve
the conflict. It talks about helping kids resolve conflict :
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5218.html
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