Abstract and Introduction

Abstract

This paper presents a set of topical and pedagogical considerations for instructors teaching material on sensitive subjects with either the primary or secondary aim of addressing prevention. Prevention can be approached as an effort to create changes in an individual's attitudes/beliefs, knowledge, and behavior. Following this framework, classroom content that challenges students' perceptions, preconceived notions, and attitudes can be seen as preventive in nature. Preparing students to work through the same layers of complexity that thoroughly trained and experienced researchers and practitioners struggle with requires particular attention to the classroom environment.

Introduction

The goal of this paper is to provide a set of topical and pedagogical considerations for instructors teaching material on sensitive subjects (i.e., racial or gender discrimination, child abuse, interpersonal violence, or other types of social injustice) with either the primary or secondary aim of addressing prevention. For example, a course on child abuse and neglect might be infused with prevention content and designed to prepare students to design, implement, or evaluate prevention programs, or the course might take a less direct approach to prevention and instead promote critical examination of the ideologies and practices that underlie family violence, leaving perhaps a single module to specific prevention approaches. Similarly, courses on gender studies, sexuality, race and ethnic studies, as well as other types of diversity all might include modules that address prevention by challenging student attitudes and perceptions of sociological trends and culturally reinforced power structures. Although these themes are connected less directly to prevention, they are absolutely relevant and a part of the training all prevention professionals receive.

Prevention can be approached as an effort to create changes in individual's attitudes/beliefs, knowledge, and behavior (Reppucci et al. 1997). Following this framework, classroom content that goes beyond providing information and adds the dimension of challenging students' perceptions, preconceived notions, and attitudes can be preventive in nature. This is particularly true for courses in which the instructor takes focused aim at students' lived experience beyond demonstrating competence in content. Content provided in the social sciences readily informs two areas—content specific information and personal meaning. Students can take from social sciences courses information and practices that change their interactions in the social world. For example, courses on Family Violence often cover the epidemiology of violence in the home and research methods used to measure occurrence, but they can also go further and teach material on the prevailing attitudes and social underpinnings of interpersonal violence with the aim of preparing students to challenge themselves and those they interact with outside the classroom toward prevention. Regardless of whether these classes are in an academic or community setting, teaching content that lends itself to prevention requires attention to specific practices that are often left unarticulated and unattended.

Preparing students to work through the same layers of complexity that thoroughly trained and experienced researchers and practitioners struggle with requires particular attention to classroom environment. Given current rates of interpersonal harassment and violence (Department of Health and Human Services 2001), each audience is likely to include individuals with firsthand experiences in this area or who, at a minimum, have preconceived ideas about whom social inequity or victimization effects, how it happens, and what should be done to prevent its occurrence. Instructors should consider if their course design will address issues of social attitudes as special subject modules within the structure of the course (e.g., a session dedicated entirely to sexism or racism), or if these themes will be incorporated across all modules in the course curriculum.

It should be noted that the same practices used in an undergraduate classroom apply to community learning environments as well; therefore, although the rigor and depth of any given course may vary, it is our aim to articulate the set of practices that may be useful in a variety of settings. Presented here is a set of key elements and pedagogical techniques that foster classroom environments that are critical, honest, and safe enough for an exploration of sensitive subjects in the social sciences. These classroom strategies and content considerations will support teaching prevention regardless of whether the course is one on child abuse and neglect, social injustice, or diversity. This material falls into the two broad categories of content considerations and managing the learning environment. Each of these two categories is discussed further in the following sections.

Our goal is to empower all in our community to recognize hazing in its various forms, to know what to do when they see hazing activity or experience it directly, and to feel confident in taking action.  One of the ways we hope to empower our community to do this is through awareness, education, and access to resources.  On this page, you will find a variety of resources that will help you assist in helping all members of our community be involved in campus life in a positive and meaningful way. 

A Home Without Hazing

Training for Hazing Prevention at W&M

A Home Without Hazing training will be offered at W&M in order to support on-going hazing prevention efforts.  We believe that no one should ever be demeaned or exposed to harm in their efforts to be part of campus life.  In-person participation in A Home Without Hazing training will be required for all student organizations with new members.  A Home Without Hazing trainings will consist of four separate required trainings (prospective members, new members, active members, and advisors). 

Training dates and registration information can be found at the Hazing Prevention at W&M TribeLink page.

We utilize research-informed and evidence-based approaches to prevention education that are rooted in the public health model and best practice. This includes following the nine principles of prevention.

Comprehensive Services

Strategies should include multiple components and affect multiple settings to address a wide range of risk and protective factors of the target problem.

Varied Teaching Methods

Strategies should include multiple teaching methods, including some type of active, skills based component.

Sufficient Dosage

Participants need to be exposed to enough of the activity for it to have an effect.

Theory Driven

Preventive strategies should have scientific or logical rationale.

Positive Relationships

Programs should foster strong, stable, positive relationships.

Appropriately Timed

Program activities should happen at a time (developmentally) that can have maximum impact in a participant's life.

Socio-culturally Relevant

Programs should be tailored to fit within cultural beliefs and practices of specific groups, as well as local community norms.

Outcome Assessment and Evaluation

A systematic outcome evaluation is necessary to determine whether a program or strategy worked.

Well-Trained Staff

Programs need to be implemented by staff members who are sensitive, competent, and have received sufficient training, support, and supervision. Follow up (booster) training and technical assistance to staff are critical.

Passive and active programing and awareness opportunities are available for the campus community throughout each academic year.

AWARENESS PROGRAMING

Awareness programs consist of campus-wide programming, initiatives and opportunities aimed to increase knowledge of resources and information to prevent forms of violence, promote safety and reduce perpetration of violence.

PRIMARY PREVENTION

Primary prevention programs consist of programming, initiatives and opportunities intended to stop interpersonal violence before it occurs. The focus of primary prevention includes promoting healthy and respectful behaviors, understanding and expressing personal boundaries, encouraging mutually respectful dating relationships, healthy sexuality and safe bystander intervention.

RISK REDUCTION

Risk reduction is aimed at providing students with information to reduce their risk of experiencing or perpetrating forms of interpersonal violence. Risk reduction education can range from alcohol and drug education, looking out for friends, safety planning, and understanding, establishing and respecting personal boundaries. This form of education is not considered a primary form of prevention; however, risk reduction is an essential component to interpersonal violence prevention as a whole.

BYSTANDER INTERVENTION

Bystander intervention is a community-oriented approach to violence prevention and promoting a community of safety and respect. These skills can be carried out by an individual or a group of individuals to prevent harm and reduce the risk of a potentially harmful situation from getting worse. This includes recognizing potential harmful behaviors and situations, recognizing barriers or obstacles to intervening, identifying safe and effective options for intervening, and taking action to intervene. Currently, Hope College uses the Green Dot model for bystander intervention education.

Get others involved. This can be getting a close friend to help you or finding someone with authority like your RA, contacting Campus Safety at 616.395.7000 or calling 911.

Proactive Bystander Opportunities

Bring a proactive bystander means doing little things every day through our words, thoughts and actions that promote a campus of safety, healthy relationships, care and respect. Proactive bystander techniques promote two main ideas:

1. Violence is not tolerated in our community
2. We each have a responsibility to positively contribute to our community

Here are some ideas of ways that you can be proactive:

• Post a relevant article on your Facebook page
• Sign the It’s On Us Campaign pledge
  
• Learn about campus and community resources
• Attend a campus event related to interpersonal violence prevention
• Talk with a friend about being an active and proactive bystander
• Wear an It’s On Us Hope t-shirt
• Use the hashtag #ItsOnUsHope
• Follow STEP and It’s On Us Hope on Facebook
• Request a STEP educator presentation by emailing step@hope.edu
• Change the signature line on your email to include a relevant quote or link to the It’s On Us Campaign website
  

Content Considerations

This section addresses the course material on sensitive subjects often left unaddressed in classrooms—material that should be included when the pedagogical aims of the course include infusing prevention throughout the curriculum, whether the course addresses social injustice broadly or a specific example thereof. There is a set of content areas that too often are unspoken as the subtext for creating social change through prevention. When the goals of a course include preparing students to enter prevention science as a profession or to encourage each individual student to move through the social world more aware of preventing social injustice, these areas should be directly articulated. In particular, the following subjects are addressed: (a) best practice fundamentals of prevention; (b) local and federal policy/practice; (c) power versus numerical delineation of majority and minority status; and (d) individual versus institutionalized disempowerment.

Best Practice Fundamentals of Prevention

Whether prevention is the primary focus or a secondary theme in a course, there are several aspects of prevention science that should be addressed. As a whole, published evaluations of prevention programs represent only a small number of the interventions that take place; as a result, our knowledge of what works and what practices to avoid is limited by a lack of published evaluation efforts (for a discussion of one specific case of this dearth, see Russell et al., 2008). Nonetheless, there is a need to describe the diversity in prevention efforts (ranging from single shot public service announcements, to longitudinal efforts; from home visitation, drop-in wellness centers, to volunteer based information tip lines by phone) and the methods that promote change in attitude, knowledge, and behavior for different populations.

Students considering questions of program efficacy will benefit from an understanding of basic prevention science: Literature reviews of past efforts in each prevention area will familiarize prevention professionals with what has worked in the past as far as prevention content, methods, and short and long term efficacy. From there, a needs assessment should inform intervention design, and the resulting design should include evaluation practices that use valid, reliable measures. Participants' exposure to intervention content needs to be timed toward the best teaching moment(s) and consider the number of exposures or doses most likely to promote long term change.

Even if prevention methods are positioned in a course to fill a partial content module, for example, as part of a module on child maltreatment in a broader child development course, students' understanding of epidemiology, occurrence, and social acceptance can be informed by an understanding of how experts have attempted to study and prevent child maltreatment. Although it may be outside the scope of a course to prepare students to design a prevention program, walking students through the design and evaluation process can be an opportunity to make connections between theory, research methods, social values, and policy domains. For example, a description of the history of Head Start can begin with a historical and cultural perspective on childcare in the post World War II era, then describe the legislative process behind the national program, and finally, cover the measurement used as services are provided to families in order to document the program's effects on subsequent adolescent delinquency and violent crime rates.

Local and Federal Policy/Practice

When presenting students with material on prevention practice, instructors should consider taking even a brief portion of class time to discuss the legal and policy climate in which prevention efforts exist. Students often are surprised to learn that each state defines and prosecutes child abuse differently, for example. Given the need for prevention program fidelity for cross-site comparison and program evaluation purposes, these local differences make large-scale child abuse prevention efforts difficult. An understanding of how a given community prosecutes and tracks sexual predation, for example, can inform students' awareness of which date rape prevention efforts are likely to be funded and supported pragmatically. Using both local and wide-scale examples to illustrate policy issues (e.g., descriptions of local safe haven laws paired with termination of parental rights policy and the Adoption and Safe Family Act) provides the most ecologically complete picture for students. This consideration clearly dovetails nicely with the previous section on best practices in prevention science, hence instructors are encouraged to pair the two: Using both local and federal program examples to teach the best practices used in intervention will support students' understanding of the practical programmatic restraints prevention contends with regardless of subject (e.g., smoking cessation, domestic violence, and high school bullying prevention programs are all faced with similar types of barriers to message penetration and the duration of their overall impact).

Power versus Numerical Delineation of Majority and Minority Status

In the context of teaching students about social interactions of all types that may warrant prevention—from discrimination to assault—it might be useful to examine a particular socio-structural issue: students must understand the difference between power-based minorities and numerical minorities. This is the idea that majority and minority status can be identified in terms of power as opposed to number. Accordingly, both numerical minorities and majorities that are disempowered are referred to as minorities, as a means of recognizing the power structures within which socio-political groups currently exist (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Although behavior targeted for prevention can take many forms, consider that which occurs in the context of social injustice. These aspects of societal discrimination/oppression address socio-political power rather than number alone, in the concept of majority or minority group status. For example, during Apartheid in South Africa, Black South Africans were a power minority group although they were a numerical majority group who made up over three quarters of the population (Republic of South Africa 1992). In contrast, wealthy people historically have constituted a power majority despite being a numerical minority in society. Societal power dynamics are of relevance to social interactions because they set constraints on the recourse available to power minorities when they are targets of social injustice ranging from discrimination to interpersonal violence. Identifying power dynamics that contribute to social injustice sets the stage for teaching prevention.

Designing and implementing effective prevention programs requires an understanding of the communities in which prevention could occur. This means having an awareness of local pragmatic resources (e.g., possible funding, staffing, and recruitment sources), as well as the psychosocial attitudes that exist. Whether an identified group of individuals feels capable of change, or whether there are perceived social obstacles to participation in prevention efforts, is a very real concern for all prevention scientists. Identifying group status in terms of power rather than number helps students understand that majority group status is associated with automatic privilege, where the majority group is the unexamined default or generic form of status. Consider the question that is sometimes asked of gay, lesbian, or bisexual individuals, "When did you ‘come out' to your family?" Heterosexuals are rarely, if ever, asked when they announced their sexual orientation to their parents; it is the default sexual orientation that comes with the automatic privilege of not having to be announced. Likewise, we use qualifiers such as ‘lady doctor,' or ‘African American doctor' when referring to power minorities, but say ‘doctor,' without qualifiers, when we refer to a White male (Matlin 2000). In the latter instance, the White male is the default doctor that comes with the automatic privilege of not needing announcement in the form of qualifiers. In each instance, whether it is about sexual orientation, gender, or race, the default status is empowered because it is the mainstream and has automatic privilege.

The automatic privilege of majority groups makes power minorities potentially vulnerable. For example, consider the wage advantage of men as an instance of male automatic privilege. Bornstein (2006) reports that women's economic dependence on intimate partners places them at risk for domestic violence. Power minority groups often are aware of the limits to their power and fear the consequences of challenging the power structures they exist in. Change, in the form of prevention, faces an intangible obstacle—social power—in these cases. When teaching about aspects of social power as a consideration in prevention science, it is essential that students understand the relationship between power dynamics and majority–minority status, as it contributes to the meaning of social interaction of all types.

Individual versus Institutionalized Disempowerment

Teaching students to recognize the layers of social power that wrap around a given population is an important step in encouraging them, as future prevention professionals, to acknowledge the complexity they will propose by advocating for change. This same awareness will also inform their own social interactions outside the classroom and serve as primary prevention in their own lives. Addressing power dynamics that are institutionalized further enhances considerations of societal power.

There is a distinction between institutionalized disempowerment (e.g., sexism or heterosexism) and individual disempowerment (A insulting B), which creates a differential impact on the experience of negative social interactions worthy of prevention. Addressing institutionalized disempowerment first, if Peter and Jane are married and Peter beats Jane, she may have difficulty leaving because of the ‘gender gap' in wages. If Jane has a graduate or professional degree she will earn 65.79% of what her husband does despite being in the same education bracket, if they both earn the median wage for that group (United States Census Bureau 2005). When wage disparities between men and women prevail across ethnicity, levels of education, and time, it reflects institutionalized sexism or institutionalized disempowerment/discrimination perpetrated against women. Consider a different example like health insurance. Many health insurance companies do not provide benefits to same-gender partners who are institutionally denied marriage rights in most states (Matlin 2000). This is institutionalized heterosexism, or institutionalized disempowerment/discrimination, perpetrated against same sex couples.

Similarly, students learning to recognize these power dynamics may benefit from an examination of how race is institutionalized in our culture (Jones 1972). Certainly, examples from our legal system include the disproportionate amount of time in prison given to Black offenders relative to White offenders who have committed similar crimes (regardless of the crime). When considering violent crimes, one can see a trend in the nature of prosecution of the crime and the nature of the punishment for the crime (Kennedy 2001); in addition to the disproportionate punishment for the crime, a prosecuting attorney is more likely to ask for the maximum penalty for the crime if the alleged perpetrator is a Person of Color (Kennedy 2001). Awareness of institutionalized disempowerment is a crucial component in identifying sources of social injustice in the teaching of prevention.

Situations of individual disempowerment, on the other hand, have different consequences than the examples reflecting institutionalized disempowerment previously described. Individual disempowerment can happen when victimization occurs either within a group between its own members, or by members of a minority group toward a majority group. In the preceding circumstances, injustice is occurring at the individual level and does not have the weight of institutionalized disempowerment behind it. In the instances of race and gender, we hear the words ‘reverse discrimination,' or more particularly, ‘reverse racism' and ‘reverse sexism.' In fact, it might be argued that racism and sexism and many other forms of discrimination are so rooted in their institutional form that to speak of ‘reverse discrimination' trivializes the juggernaut that is institutionalized disempowerment. Individual-level discrimination does not limit the options of its targets in the same ways that institutionalized disempowerment does (Crandall and Beasley 2001; hooks 1995). Therefore, when injustice occurs as individual-level disempowerment, it is not anywhere near equal in magnitude or meaning to its occurrence in the context of institutionalized disempowerment. This is one of the most difficult ideas for students to unravel, as so much of North American culture focuses on individual responsibility for actions. The notion that society, as a collective structure, has differential bearing on the acts of individuals is difficult to accept. Yet, we must examine socio-political structures that maintain disempowerment and discrimination if we are to use teaching as a means of primary prevention.

Our goal is to empower all in our community to recognize hazing in its various forms, to know what to do when they see hazing activity or experience it directly, and to feel confident in taking action.  One of the ways we hope to empower our community to do this is through awareness, education, and access to resources.  On this page, you will find a variety of resources that will help you assist in helping all members of our community be involved in campus life in a positive and meaningful way. 

A Home Without Hazing

Training for Hazing Prevention at W&M

A Home Without Hazing training will be offered at W&M in order to support on-going hazing prevention efforts.  We believe that no one should ever be demeaned or exposed to harm in their efforts to be part of campus life.  In-person participation in A Home Without Hazing training will be required for all student organizations with new members.  A Home Without Hazing trainings will consist of four separate required trainings (prospective members, new members, active members, and advisors). 

Training dates and registration information can be found at the Hazing Prevention at W&M TribeLink page.

The Prevention Education Office recognizes the adjustments students face when they embark on their academic careers. This sometimes includes moving away from family and long-time friends, to a new living and learning environment.

The manner in which students cope with these changes, and develop throughout their college years impacts the preparedness for their lives after college. Maintaining a healthy balance between social, academic, and work priorities can assist in this process, while use of alcohol and other drugs may compromise this development.

Our office exists to help students understand the connection between substance misuse and future success, to identify their individual risk factors for chemical dependency, and examine the choices they have made regarding alcohol and other drug use. Toward this goal, we provide the following services:

• Self-referrals
  • We welcome self-referrals for students to privately speak about their substance use with an alcohol and drug educator. We examine patterns of substance use, and meet students where they are at. Our goal is to educate students and increase their ability to make healthy choices around using alcohol and other substances.
• 3rd Millennium
  • An online course designed specifically to help students who have violated alcohol or cannabis policies make safer, healthier choices. The course provides a strong educational foundation to support campus judicial programs and is an essential component of our comprehensive alcohol prevention initiatives.
• Counseling 
  • Individual counseling at our Counseling Center is available for students with alcohol or other drug-related problems.
• Educational Outreach
  • The Prevention Educator is available to conduct a variety of training sessions and workshops on substance misuse for residence halls, COR 101 classes, student clubs, and organizations.
• Information and Resources
  • A variety of materials concerning substance use and misuse are available for use by students, outside of the office in Van Hoesen, room B-1. Information about campus and other community resources is also available. Feel free to stop in, too!
• Alcohol Free Environments and Events

Get Involved

Online Resources