Co-creating Short Video Films to Raise Elementary School Students’ Awareness on Bullying

Bullying has attracted worldwide research interest mainly due to its negative effects on the children involved. In this study elementary students were motivated by their teachers to look seriously at this social issue and co-create three plays by selecting the theme, researching the topic from a variety of perspectives and by choosing characters. Students participated in creating and performing their own theatre pieces in order to produce three short video films about body shaming, racial discrimination and cyberbullying. The purpose of the present project activity is to explore gender differences in bullying and victimization among a sample of Greek early adolescents, identify possible changes in bullying and victimization behaviour after the film co-creating process and adapted strategies for addressing bullying. This anti-bullying project explored the hypothesis that children who were actively involved in this play-creating process and these hypothetical scenarios, would report less bullying and victimization behaviour. The partisipants consisted of 20 preadolescent 6th-grade students of the Experimental School of The University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Anti-bullying programs may alter students’ behaviour and should be taken into account by education professionals, researchers and policymakers.