Character strength = Lower teen violence, Acting Together project shows
The privacy of students who participated in The Powerful Teen Study was ensured in part through these cardboard desk covers, provided by AT staff and student assistants at the time the high school surveys were conducted. Photo illustration.
By Sheila Reynolds, Surrey North Delta Leader
Self-esteem, gratitude and parent involvement put teens at a lower risk for violence, according to preliminary findings from a survey of local youth.
The Powerful Teen Study by the Surrey-based Acting Together project, which involved a survey of more than 400 Grade 8 students, indicate character strengths and connections with adults lead to a reduced belief in violence.
“Schools and some youth programs already seek to build character strengths,” said Dr. Roger Tweed, one of the project’s co-investigators. “These findings confirm the relevance of character strengths and suggest there may be value in additional efforts to build gratitude, humility, self-esteem, and authenticity.” Read more…
Vancouver Sun publishes “Academics and community: Two solitudes”
An opinion piece exploring the relationship between academics and the community by Dr. Gira Bhatt, the project director and principal investigator for Acting Together SSHRC-CURA, and Charan Gill, an Acting Together partner and CEO of Progressive Intercultural Community Service, has been published by The Vancouver Sun.
“Academics and community: Two solitudes” speaks to the value of collaborations as Acting Together continues its community-based research aiming to help prevent youth violence. An excerpt is reprinted below.
The boatman, though not book-smart, was found to possess valuable knowledge of his own.
Academics and community: Two solitudes
There is much to be learned from the Indian story about the boatman and the arrogant mathematician
By Gira Bhatt and Charan Gill, Vancouver Sun
‘Once upon a time, there was a mathematician.” So starts a children’s story in India.
The mathematician was a genius, but he was also very arrogant. Once he needed to cross a river. He found a boatman sitting idly in a weathered boat, who agreed to take the mathematician across the river.
Once the boatman started to row, the mathematician looked around, pondering, and asked the boatman: “Do you know how deep this river is?”
“It’s quite deep, sir” replied the boatman.
“How many feet deep?” asked the mathematician. Read more…
Watch: Surrey teens’ video on gang issues now online
Jay Dobyns is being interviewed by Surrey students about his time infiltrating the Hells Angels as a former U.S. ATF undercover agent.
The final product of a collaborative project that enabled Surrey students to learn media skills and then use them to create a video exploring gang issues is now publicly available on YouTube and Vimeo.
The video “Gangs and Youth Views from a Lower Mainland Symposium” is the result of a collaboration between Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Acting Together – Community University Research Alliance (AT-CURA) project, Shaw Communications, Inc., Surrey School District and Surrey Safe Schools.
It was created earlier this year under the training and guidance of Michael Keeping, director of Urban Rush and Studio 4 at Shaw TV. The teens, who were learning media production skills for the first time, developed skills in story building, interviewing, lighting, filming, editing and voice-over techniques. Read more…
