Team work against bullying by 'Children speak' in Barcelona
Equip SEER (managing entity) collaborates with IIAB (adhering entity) in the 'Children Speak', program of the city of Barcelona. The IIAB program is commissioned by the Barcelona City Council, with the support of the Barcelona Education Consortium and the facilitation of Equip SEER in the implementation of the project.
Barcelona children ask for more emotional help and team work against the bullying
Click to see the 2nd Children's Agenda
The Children's Agenda highlights the issues that most concern the children of Barcelona, and among these eleven issues, they ask for help to overcome bullying (2nd demand), with ideas such as organizing campaigns or workshops, involving teachers and families so that they can talk to each other and better understand how the children are doing, or providing mutual support.
Ramiro Ortegón, president of the PDA Bullying platform and partner of Equip SEER, explains in an article published in the Diari de l'Educació some keys to addressing the issue, such as institutions taking the necessary leadership to resolve situations of mistreatment, while also launching preventive initiatives that promote well-being.
Another demand from the children is to have more emotional support and less pressure about how they should be (demand 4), which includes ideas such as promoting healthy lifestyle habits, discussing how they feel in tutorial spaces and with the family, or being mindful of the way they speak to each other to avoid making anyone feel bad. In this vein, the facilitation that SEER has carried out for the Children’s Speakers in schools has placed special emphasis on taking care of the entire emotional process of the children and the group, with an awareness that coexistence itself has a direct relationship with individual and group well-being.
In this context, Laura Torrella, director of Equip SEER, shares in another article from the Diari de l’Educació the role of adults in the emotional accompaniment of children, facilitating their ability not only to improve their awareness of how they feel but also to project themselves toward greater well-being and gain personal and collective resources to achieve it.
Participation in child participation programs, such as the "Parlen els nens i nenes" program, provides opportunities to work on these aspects, with the certainty that when children develop this right to participate, they gain autonomy, critical capacity, and involvement in the problems of the school and their peers, and therefore feel more concerned when there are situations that disrupt coexistence.
Equip SEER collaborates with IIAB in the "Parlen els nens i nenes" program
In the summer of 2023, the collaboration between Equip SEER and the Institute of Childhood and Adolescence of Barcelona (IIAB) began through the "Parlen els nens i nenes" program, an initiative that was launched in 2016 in its first edition. This is a social research and child participation program that has generated knowledge about the well-being of the city's children through the process of creating the Children's Agenda, a document that gathers 11 demands with concrete proposals and ideas, each one aimed at improving the well-being of children, based on asking the children themselves and co-creating this final agenda with them.
Based on the Agenda and the experience of the first edition of the program, SEER and IIAB have co-created the Didactic Guide, which allows the implementation of a project in schools: the creation of Children's Speakers, a work proposal with fifth-grade students to disseminate the content of the Children's Agenda and generate dialogue spaces with other children in the center, with teachers, and with families, and to achieve commitments for improving some of the demands, adapted to the reality of each school. Additionally, in 10 of the 13 schools, we have implemented the project through a facilitator who has accompanied the groups in the 9 sessions that the experience lasts, including the three dialogues.
Moreover, on June 6th, the Children's Speaker of the City was launched, marking the final phase of the program, which brings child participation to a municipal level by forming a group of children from different schools that previously participated to continue disseminating the Agenda and seeking commitments in favor of improving the well-being of children with different political and social representatives.
Here you can find the press release.
In collaboration with: Laura Torrella (director of Equip SEER).
Published: June 20, 2024
