At our school, we have been running the Zero Violence Brave Club for several years. In order to implement it effectively, we consider training sessions and the reading of articles published in scientific journals on this topic to be essential. For us, it has been very important to be able to discuss these articles with a variety of schools (thanks to the Ministry’s grouped schools project) and with researchers.
Thanks to these dialogues, we know that we must focus on creating safe and violence-free environments for all students. At our school, students and their families are grateful to have the Zero Violence Brave Club because we teach them not to tolerate any violent act or behavior toward themselves or others. Since we know that students with disabilities are more vulnerable to bullying, as a school we are very proud to implement such an effective program and to see every day how it helps our students. In the face of violence, they no longer feel alone, because they support each other; in the Zero Violence Brave Club, students learn to defend others, to support the victim, to care about them, to look out for them in case they need anything…
To achieve this, we create spaces for dialogue so they can report such situations. They do so in different ways: verbally, through augmentative or alternative communication systems… The method doesn’t matter—what truly matters is that we listen to their voices, support them, and continue teaching them to take a stand in favor of the victim and to assert themselves. We have witnessed students who have improved their behavior at school and have been able to extend this to other environments, such as their homes or leisure spaces. Some new students have even told us, “I wish there were a club like this in every school in the world.” We want a safe school with brave students.
As you can see, the dialogues and the impacts derived from reading these articles and implementing the Zero Violence Brave Club show exactly the opposite of what some “journalists” tried to claim by twisting two decontextualized sentences.
Article translated from Periódico Educación
Special education teacher and principal of the Virgen de la Esperanza Special Education Center (Cheste)