A Dialogic Approach: Bullying, Rabelais, and Forgiveness

In our current society the dominant grand narratives suggest that it's okay to commit harms as long as there are some type of justification. That justification could be as simple as power over -- or to put more bluntly -- “just because we can”. These harmful grand narratives create contexts that leave justifications for war, environmental destruction, institutional racism, class division and privilege, sexism in various forms, and etc. It should come as no surprise that we see bullying at epidemic levels in our schools. Some of the narratives that we hear surrounding bullying are “get over it,” or “that's just the way it is,” or even “toughen up”. These types of bullying narratives have led to the Columbine Massacre and other mass shootings, but less dramatic, yet still impactful, they have left emotional scars on those bullied that have lasted a lifetime.

I am interested in creating an anti-bullying atmosphere within schools. I am interested in the idea of how forgiveness can be interwoven into the process of moving from harms committed to a collaborative relational approach. From the person(s) who has been harmed to forgive the person who has harmed, for the person who harmed to receive the forgiveness, to self-forgive, and to forgive when the harming party is not committed to repairing the harm done. I am interested exploring whether or not students even hold the belief that forgiveness is important or not.

This will be a participatory action research project that will be conducted in two phases. The first phase will be a restorative justice conference that will be about healing the harms committed. The second phase will be immersing myself into the student community to elicit ideas from the students to combat bullying. I'm interested in working with the students from a “non-expert,” “non-authoritarian” role. I posit that with the use of a dialogic approach we can move forward by treating the students as the experts. That is not to say that there is not wisdom from myself or the greater community for ideas on combating bullying. Yet with all the experts on anti-bullying it does not seem that bullying has ceased within our schools. So I'm interested in going from a monologic approach to bullying to a dialogic approach to bullying. The school that I will be involved in is a free democratic school that some consider an “un-schooling” school. No students will be forced to come to the meetings to help combat bullying. Due to the school being all age and commingled it could lead to the rabelais lens of this research project. The aim is to not turn down any ideas from any of the students to combat bullying.

One of the essential aspects for this research is to hold a reflexive stance. Not coming in as the expert, the research could go in many directions. The students might not even be interested in combating bullying. It might have to happen on their own terms and not some kind of formalized group. But as the students-as-experts I am interested in eliciting some type of knowledge or wisdom that could be brought into other schools or communities. The best way to go forward is to be reflexive and to ask the questions: What went right? What went wrong? What should we do again? What should we not do again?