| By Michelle Lee |
Anti-Bullying Day was inspired by two high school students, David Shepherd and Travis Price, from Nova Scotia, who took a stand against bullying. The boys witnessed a fellow student being bullied because he wore a pink shirt on the first day of school. After the incident, Shepherd and Price handed out pink shirts and encouraged their classmates to wear the shirts in support of the bullied student. Hundreds of students wore the pink shirts to school the next day.
Their actions led the United Nations to create Anti-Bullying Day, also known as Pink Shirt Day. It is celebrated on various dates around the world, but the official day is May 4. It is recognized by many countries, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Why is bullying such an important issue?
Once thought of as a normal part of childhood, bullying is now being recognized as a serious public health issue. According to a 2017 study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University, 73 percent of students reported that they had been bullied at school at some point in their lives.
Bullying can cause lasting psychological and emotional damage and is an issue that affects the entire community.
Understanding bullying along with how and why it occurs can help schools, teachers, parents, and students take steps to stop it. Through education and other anti-bullying programs, communities across the country are working to prevent bullying. Gale’s new eBook Unlocking Current Issues: Bullying presents students with content for today’s concerns on this topic, including a history of bullying through the ages and early studies and attempts to curb bullying behavior. Chapters also cover cyberbullying, anti-bullying campaigns, and issues facing students and caregivers today—like whether cyberbullying should be criminalized.
Learn more about bullying, and other current issues, with Gale
Bullying is one of the five titles included in the Unlocking Current Issues set just published by Gale in March 2018. Other titles in this set include Transgender Life, Guns in America, Race and the Law, and Immigration in America.
Each title in the Unlocking Current Issues set contains new classroom-friendly features, including the following:
- Curriculum mapping – Aligns learning standards, assessments, and instructional techniques to a set curriculum.
- Chapter learning objective – Statement of what students will be able to demonstrate after reading the chapter.
- Critical-thinking questions – Questions posed for students to research, analyze, and evaluate.
- Primary sources – Sources that give first-hand evidence about a topic. These sources include historical documents, speeches, and personal narratives.
- Classroom-ready activities – Activities aligned to specific curriculum standards, skill, and level of rigor.
- Worksheets – Printable templates aligned to text material.
- Instructional guides – Suggests ways the content can be used in the classroom, emphasize connections to the curriculum, provide practical tips, and more.
- Lists of further resources – Resources and suggestions for students to go beyond the text to delve deeper into a particular topic.
- Integrated video in eBook – Video is carefully selected to support and enhance content, and help make concepts vivid to students.
These features make the Unlocking Current Issues set a great middle-school resource and provide clear connections for classroom and teacher use.
Unlocking Current Issues is available in print and eBook format on GVRL.
Meet the Author
Michelle is a senior content developer at Cengage Learning, where she works on the K12 Curriculum and Humanities team. In her spare time she enjoys reading and going for walks with her dog, Moose.