A Closer Look at ELL Bullying

On my first blog post I introduced the topic I researched, ELL(English Language Learners) bullying. For the part of the project I went over to my old school where I interviewed one of my old teachers about my topic. The seconds blog post was all about the interview and what went on during it. I also did more research. So, for my Agent of Change, I went back to my old school to give a presentation on ELL bullying. This school has a lot of ELLs and I figured they had experienced this problem.

Usually when you are reading/watching something about bullying, you expect statistics that show how many students were bullied and things like that. Well, during my research I learned that people haven’t talked about the bullying of the ELLs. There needs to be more articles written about that and more publicity about it so the people are aware that it’s a big problem. There were specific examples but very small numbers.

I wanted to make a change by spreading the word and letting people know that ELL bullying is a very serious problem. In order to do that I contacted one of my old teachers and we talked to the principal of the school. He agreed for me to go there and give a 45-min presentation on ELL bullying. If you would like to see my presentation, take a look.

About thirty five people attended my presentation. As I was getting everything together I heard some of the students say “Why are we here?” or “Ugh… another bullying presentation!” I turned around and I explained what I was about to present. I told them that it wasn’t just about bullying, but ELL bullying. Bullying that happens to students like them. Then suddenly, they were all paying attention and became more interested.

During my presentation a teacher, Mr. Dale Perkins, helped me a lot. He explained more thoroughly the things that I was saying because some of the students couldn't understand. He also helped me with the activity at the end of the presentation. We passed out four poster boards and we told the students to write mean things on them. At first the students were kind of shy but then, after a few words, they starting writing so many things. Then we collected those papers and passed out four other poster boards, but this time they had to write nice things. The students started writing nice word and everyone wanted to write something. After that, I took the posters that had mean words written on them and ripped them apart. I told the students that the words had no meaning and did not matter. Then, I took the posters that had nice words on them and we all read them out loud.