A Month of School Visits

June 11, 2021

A Month of School Visits

A Month of school visits

The 'Maddie is Online' team (Mr Ioannis Panayiotakis and Dr Konstantina Martzoukou) enjoyed a series of visits to schools in East Renfrewshire, meeting with hundreds of children in S1 classes and playing series 1 'Online Resilience'.

As part of the sessions, an ice-breaking activity was initially organised, were children used a star and a cloud shape to report positive and negative feelings of online connectivity. That was followed by a video-based exercise, which involved the “Maddie is Online” video series 1. Children were first asked to watch the introductory video, which was played in class or in the library space, introducing them to the scenario and the protagonist of the story, Maddie, and then they were asked to choose from the available choices in given scenarios that presented possible solutions to an incident of online bullying that Maddie experienced.

There were a total of six possible solutions and each child was provided with a sheet that contained all the scenarios to choose from. The possible scenarios were as following:

Ignore the message
Confront the child
Go to mum and ask her what to do
Give the phone to mum
Go to mum and ask her to speak to the child
Unfriend and block the child.

The scenarios were designed on the basis of previous work developed by d'Haenens et al. (2013), distinguishing three different categories of coping strategies, understood as “thoughts and behaviours to adapt to stressful or disturbing situations, in order to protect oneself from further psychological harm”: (1) “fatalistic/passive coping strategies”, which involve decisions that relate to not using the Internet for some time or taking no action and expecting the problem to disappear on its own, (2) “communicative coping” which involves talking to someone else and (3) “proactive coping” with options such as “trying to fix the problem” and “deleting unwelcome messages” (p. 2).

Children chose different solutions, demonstrating diverse levels of engagement with the problem and willingness to take direct action or involve others to help. Our plan is to analyse these responses over the summer and offer an initial report of the results. Previous research in this area, conducted by d'Haenens et al. (2013) as part of the EU Kids Online project, found that when dealing with issues of online bullying, the majority of children would block the sender and this was evaluated as the most helpful strategy, which was described as a “proactive coping (problem-solving)” explained above. It will be interesting to find out if the same or different results will be found in our own study.

At the end of the session, videos with the different choices were played, so that the children could explore what happened in the different scenarios. Intentionally, none of the scenarios were made in a way that was linked to a correct solution, as in each, Maddie would come up with new questions and problems to explore. This was explained to the children on the basis that not all situations may be similar and therefore, a combination of different methods or even other methods may work better. The story was concluded by means of playing the last video, “Maddie is Online Final Thoughts”, which explained the “moral” of the story and offered advice on what would be helpful to do in similar situations or "Maddie is Online: Reflections on Cyberbullying" which offered a final reflection on the issues.

Thank you to all the schools who accommodated our visits, to the supportive teachers and librarians and the actively participating children who took part in our sessions!