March 5 - 9, 2018
Be The Change Projects: 'Impact of Language'
This group of students were inspired to create awareness about the impact of negative language in school after hearing students use vulgar language towards each other. The students played a modified version of Bafa Bafa with the 7th grade class, and then they debriefed how negative words affected one society. This project seemed to make a big difference in the way this group of students spoke to each other afterwords.
March 6 - 10, 2017
Be The Change Projects:
The four CONNECTIONS participants felt they were hearing more negative language in their school and that the younger grades were being influenced. Thus they created and presented a project to educate as many students as possible on the matters of disabilities, the use of language, self-love and self-respect, respecting individuals from the LGBTQ+ community and respecting individuals from other cultural backgrounds. “We hope that in doing so we will be bettering the school environment and helping to improve the overall atmosphere of love, respect and acceptance. We also believe that by doing so we will be creating a future generation who can help to pass on the same messages to their peers and to those younger than them.
“Their project had each of the CONNECTIONS students create a different diversity topic presentation (cultural, LGBTQ, positivity, power of language) to a Grade 7 class (21 students) throughout May as well as have Cory Johnson presenting to the Grade 7 – 9's in the morning and Grade 10 – 12's in the afternoon of June 1 for a total audience of about 800 students and teachers. They created a short Pre-Survey and Post-Survey and did extensive analysis of the data which showed that the grade 7 students were significantly affected in a positive way with regards to their attitudes and behaviours. Feedback from the grade 7 teacher was extremely positive about what she noticed in terms of students understanding and attitudes. Teachers from the entire school were very clear that Cory's presentation had impacted all of the school in a very positive and significant manner
One student wrote, “I believe it went incredibly well and wish I could do it all again because it was such a great project. Our audience loved it, both the students and the teachers that attended Cory’s presentation said so and we received several emails thanking us for how well planned it was and the grade 7 class very much enjoyed their classes with us and thanked us every time. After Cory’s speech, I heard a lot of positive feedback from students. “
