#WeStandTall

Over the last several weeks, our boys have been working on creating words and images to share their thoughts on being a respectful man. This is the culmination of a lot of work breaking down stereotypes and challenging ideas of masculinity and ‘respect’ in our world. The boys have engaged amazingly well in this topic and hope that their images will encourage further conversation in our school and wider community.

It’s been a bit of a journey for us. Being connected is a big part of learning in our classroom. Through this, we came across an article in our local paper focussing on some of the issues that we were discussing. We reached out to the reporter through Twitter and gave some of our thoughts. After some ongoing discussion, this reporter asked to come and write a story about our learning.

This was a powerful experience for our boys. A week later we were contacted by a current affairs show who were also interested in the story and again, we were in the spotlight talking about the learning that was happening around this topic.

It’s become very important to the boys to encourage this learning with other students. These images are our way to try and do this.

Seb, Joel, Miles & Deacon write…
This year rooms 25 and 19 are getting together each week to have our health lessons in single gender groups.
In the boys lessons we have looked at stereotypes of boys and men in the media and discussed how what we see on TV isn’t really what life is like. When we first started these lessons we shared our ideas on how we see ourselves growing up as men. We realised that we were focussing on the things we saw in movies and that these were really negative. Since then, we have looked at the positive things that we see about the real life men in our lives are like and what we want to grow up to be. We wanted to share these ideas with the rest of the school, so we have been writing key statements and creating images inspired by the ‘Rise Above the Pack’ campaign run by the YWCA. The campaign is about being a role model in the community, not being a bystander and being respectful toward everyone. Our class came up with the ‪#‎WeStandTall‬ hashtag.

We have already had interest from other Adelaide schools, as well as schools in Canada, New Zealand and the USA in joining our project.

The boys next plan is to keep sharing with our class Twitter account and encourage others to get involved by creating their own images and statements. If you would like to join us… remember to share your images with the #WeStandTall hashtag and drop us a line at @Room25Woodend on Twitter and let us know.

Images from our #WeStandTall project.