DIGITAL COMICS TO DEVELOP SKILLS TO PREVENT AGGRESSION AT SCHOOLS

Latin American´s educational institutions have high rates of aggression and violence. This situation increase dropout rates and causes lower academic performance, along with important physical and psychological implications for students. Interventions have been conducted to implement corrective strategies focused on aggressors or victims.

This project proposes the design of a strategy to promote the development of cognitive, emotional and social skills to generate options for solving school conflicts and consider the consequences of them, reducing the use of aggression. The aim is to understand how a pedagogical strategy based on the production of digital comics fosters skills to generate options for solving school conflicts and to anticipate the potential consequences.

The strategy is aimed at preteens, Colombian 5th grade students of a public school. If focus on those not directly involved in school conflicts (bystanders) and incorporates the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a media to propose solving everyday school conflicts through digital storytelling. Narrative writing like comics encourages the expression of conflicts and developing skills to solve them because it activates the imagination and allows to represent and structure worlds that transcend the world of immediate reference.

The strategy is performed using Pixton, a web 2.0 technology to produce educational comics. During the strategy, preteens have to read a comic story that stops when a conflict breaks out. Then one of the characters asks three resolution options with their corresponding outcomes.

The research has a mixed design with experimental and control group. Data will be get from the comics, storyboards, semi-structured interviews with students and a peer nomination instrument. Qualitative data will be subjected to discourse analysis.

Project results pose a new form of classroom intervention focused on developing skills in conflict resolution especially bystanders.
The research addresses a current problem in schools worldwide. Contribute knowledge and experiences that can enable teachers to design specific classroom activities for social and emotional learning.