Students promote social change

Students at Dr. Knox are once again taking aim at bullies.

Bruce Watts' grade nine video production class is spreading the message that bulling will not be tolerated and they are doing it their way, with their voice.

The students were asked to tackle the subject of bullying for Pink Shirt Day, on Feb. 25, by filming a short narrative that centred around the issues middle school students may face everyday.

“We do this so we can help get the message out about bullying from the student’s perspective because young people hear so many messages from adults, so this is an opportunity to let students talk to each other about the topic,” explains Watts.

The project took six weeks to put together and several videos were produced in that time. Watts says for the most part grade nine students were both the actors and the directors except in two of the videos were they enlisted the help of those in grade seven.

“We needed some students who looked elementary age, so these students dressed down a little bit,” says Watts who adds that those specific productions were sent out to all of the elementary schools and they will have the option to play them on Wednesday.

Watts lets his students have total creative freedom with this project, and once a storyline is set he never redirects it.

“I am really looking for what is culturally appropriate and I find as soon as the adults start intervening it kind of circumvents that process for them.”

The videos range from issues of cyber bullying and the ever increasing changing apps that are used by teens, to transgender students.

“Transgender students are a pretty current topic and pretty relevant right now.”

Each teacher at Dr. Knox Middle School has been sent the videos and they will decide if they would like to share the video with their class during the mentorship block on Wednesday.

“The kids have also sent this out on social media, so a lot of them might have seen the videos already because the students are in charge of promoting their own video.”

Watts says the project helps students recognize that they can produce a piece of work that can create social change.

“We are finding that face-to-face bullying is starting to disappear because people are so well educated about that.”

This is the second time Watts has assigned the anti-bullying project. Back in 2013 one of the assigned videos garnered a lot of attention when students focused on gay bullying.

The video production program at Dr. Knox was also recently given a youth initiative grant from the United Way, which allowed the school to purchase new equipment.

Check out the student's YouTube page to watch all of the videos.