Rosalind Wiseman

The Owning Up™ Curriculum provides a structured program for teaching students to own up and take responsibility — as perpetrators, bystanders, and targets — for unethical behavior. The curriculum is designed for adolescent groups in schools and other settings.

The Owning Up™ Curriculum presents a unique and comprehensive approach to preventing youth violence by targeting the root causes of bullying and other forms of social cruelty. It exposes the cultural expectations that teach young people to humiliate and dehumanize others as the way to achieve power and respect, then challenges them to transform this dynamic. The program also addresses the nuanced ways in which racism, classism, and homophobia are expressed in our culture and affect social cruelty and violence.

Sessions for girls and for boys combine group discussions, games, role-playing, and other activities to engage students in understanding the complexities of adolescent social culture. Students learn to recognize that they have a responsibility to treat themselves and others with dignity and to speak out against social cruelty and injustice.

A CD-ROM of reproducible program forms and student handouts is included with the curriculum.

About the Sessions

The Owning Up™ Curriculum provides separate sequences of sessions for girls and for boys, each consisting of a total of 17 sessions. The program can be successfully taught in co-ed settings. These sessions are designed to help students achieve the following specific objectives:

• Identify and discuss behaviors and attitudes associated with groups, popularity, trust, exclusion, and bullying.
• Understand anger and how it can influence behavior and learn a strategy to enable them to communicate when angry.
• Develop a plan of action when a friend or group demeans you or someone else.
• Recognize the influence of popular culture on individuals’ behavior and decision making.
• Examine how a boy’s or girl’s self-image affects behavior and attitudes toward others.
• Develop an understanding of how culture affects interactions between boys and girls and learn skills for communicating effectively.
• Understand the concept of reputations and the challenges in staying away from gossip.
• Define cyberbullying, understand its impact, and brainstorm solutions.
• Define sexual harassment, recognize and respect boundaries, and become aware of policies relating to sexual harassment.
• Promote understanding of the differences between healthy and abusive relationships.
• Identify and strengthen support networks and personal standards of dignity.

Contents

Curriculum for Girls / Curriculum for Boys (17 Sessions each)

1. Getting Started
2. Understanding and Using SEAL
3. Cliques and Roles in Girl World / Groups and Roles in Boy World
4. Friendship Is Not a Joke
5. What’s Up with Guys? / What’s Up with Girls?
6. Perpetual Beauty Pageant / Ripped and Shredded
7. Know Your Image
8. Understanding Media and Culture
9. Reputations and the Double Standard
10. Technology and Girl World / Technology and Boy World
11. Sexual Harassment
12. Knowing When to Date and When to Dump
13. Saying Yes and Saying No
14. When Relationships Go Bad
15. Abusive Relationships are Everyone’s Business
16. Support—Giving It and Getting It
17. Transforming Girl World and Concluding the Program / Transforming Boy World and Concluding the Program

Appendixes

1. He Says, She Says: A Conversation About the Opposite Sex
2. Owning Up Curriculum Pretest/Posttest
3. Social Justice Protocols

Excerpts

Boys Session 7
Girls Session 16
SEAL Steps

Program Evaluation

We utilize pre and post testing and are focused on outcomes. A large-scale evaluation of the Owning Up Curriculum was conducted in 2001. You may view the complete report here: Evaluation Report 2001

New surveys were created for the revised 2009 edition of the Owning Up™ Curriculum, and we will update this site with the results of those surveys as they are collected:

Pretest/Posttest: Grades 6-8

Pretest/Posttest: Grades 9-12

How to Order

To purchase a copy of the Owning Up^™ Curriculum or for more information regarding placing an order, please visit Research Press’s website.