Sector: School
Unibo structure involved: Department of Education Studies “Giovanni Maria Bertin”
Unibo Team: Consuelo Mameli, Damiano Menin, prof. Annalisa Guarini (Dept. of Psycology)
Website: https://www.ou.nl/web/blurred-lives
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date: 04/09/2017
End Date: 03/09/2019
Budget: euro 284.129,00
Unibo Budget: euro 61.568,00
Coordinator: Stranmillis University College (UK)
Partners:
- GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE (UK)
- ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA(IT)
- OPEN UNIVERSITEIT NEDERLAND (NL)
- FREIE UNIVERSITAT BERLIN (GR)
Description:
The “Blurred Lives Project – a cross-national, co-participatory exploration of cyberbullying, young people and socio-economic disadvantage” will bring together five European partners (from Northern Ireland, London, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) with specific expertise and experience in tackling cyberbullying.
The four central SMART objectives of the project are as follows:
- To empower young people aged 14-16 to better understand, prevent and combat cyberbullying.
- To develop the most useful support materials for teachers, parents/carers and young people (aged 14-16) for signalling, preventing and combating cyberbullying, and to make recommendations to social networking providers.
- To determine how the young people understand, experience and respond to the present conditions of cyberbullying.
- To determine the relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and young people's understanding and experiences of cyberbullying and their responses/coping strategies.
The project is innovative in its focus on cyberbullying among young people in five different regions of the European Union, but also in its aim to be participatory, involving, training and empowering young people as co-researchers. In seeking to work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the study also uniquely aims to explore how these young people are affected by cyberbullying, but also to provide them with accessible, up-to-date resources to help them.
The project will involve young people in each partner region (aged 14-16) in responding to a survey of their experiences of cyberbullying, co-leading quality circle sessions and sequential focus group interviews, and helping create a comic book resource which is highly visual and engaging, as well as feeding into the Guide for Parents/Carers.
The project seeks to produce Intellectual Outputs which will really make a difference to teachers (IO1: Lessons and Guide for Teachers), to young people (IO2: Comic Book Guide for Pupils), to families (IO3: Guide for Parents/Carers) and to internet providers (IO4: Summary Recommendations). As such this is a project which is innovative in focus and design, but which has the potential to increase understanding and improve the lives of many hundreds of young people across the five partner regions and beyond.
