The following is adapted from The Artful Approach to Exploring Identity and Fostering Belonging by Rebecca Bellingham and Veronica Scott.
In any given school year, events from the outside world manage to find their way into the community. Maybe a student has seen something in the news and shared it with their classmates. Maybe a natural disaster has inspired a local community drive in which students are eager to participate. Maybe you’re in the midst of an election year and bracing yourself for what the results will mean to your school’s families. Or maybe the moment you’re facing is not happening on the outside at all, but within the walls of your own school or even classroom. A family in your school might be suffering a loss or someone might be undergoing treatment for an illness. Or, given the rise in hate speech, antisemitism, and bias incidents across the nation, the likelihood that your community has had to address one of these painful situations has also increased in recent years. These moments all have the potential to create fissures in the community and threaten the sense of belonging you’ve been intentionally fostering amongst your students. Some of the time, we have systems or language in place that helps us respond to these challenging moments, but sometimes we are caught off guard. In these moments, teachers can use the arts to respond with care and in turn, empower students to process the moment restoratively.
Words That Sting Lesson
In addition to addressing challenging moments occurring in the world, you might find yourself navigating bias incidents in your own classroom or community, most of which relate to harmful words and hurt feelings. Many of you are likely working with young children and might rarely be confronted with straightforward hate speech intended to harm. However, these words do make their way into the community, and even if the intent is not to harm, we know that the impact is often harmful.
In our years of teaching, we’ve encountered several incidents of students sharing or mimicking harmful words, hate speech, or even repeating stereotypes they’ve picked up from online gaming and comment boards. When moments like these have arisen in our teaching lives, we’ve often found ourselves reacting and making rushed decisions instead of responding thoughtfully. Once we noticed this pattern, we decided to start planning proactively in order to give ourselves a moment of pause. When you’re not in the midst of responding to a crisis, you can often think more clearly about how to react in a more grounded way that not only provides support, but also provides a sense of agency for children who are navigating these moments themselves. We’ve also found that crafting a response rooted in the arts is restorative and grounding for everyone.
Important Words to Remember
First, we define the terms: Harmful Words, Bystander, and Upstander.
- Harmful Words: Words that are hurtful, unkind, mean. These words put people down or hurt people’s feelings.
- Bystander: Someone who hears harmful words and does not say or do anything.
- Upstander: Someone who hears harmful words and speaks up in the moment or tells an adult.
Then, we differentiate between Harmful Words and Hate Speech.
- Harmful Words: Words that are hurtful, unkind, mean. These words put people down or hurt people’s feelings.
- Hate Speech: Cruel words that attack a person’s identity.
Next, we remind students of what makes up our identity and show the identity graphic (below).
Then, we reinforce that hate speech includes cruel words that typically target aspects of a person’s identity, which is what makes it especially cruel and hurtful. Depending on the specific hate speech you’re addressing, you might add something like, “There’s actually a long history of people saying and doing hurtful things to people of color/Black people/Jewish people/women/LGBTQ people so while hate speech can be hurtful for anyone to hear, it’s especially painful for people who share that identity.”
Next, we invite students to take a moment to reflect and process their thoughts, feelings, and questions on the Being an Upstander template below.
Again, this is another time for flexibility. We are not looking for uniform responses. This might look like some students writing a thorough paragraph of thoughts and lingering questions and other students sharing only a feeling word.
