Using Undercover Teams to Re-story Bullying Relationships

Traditional responses to bullying and harassment in schools usually focus on either punishment or exclusion of the person or persons who are bullying or by attempts to change the behaviour of the victim. The usual approaches schools make to bullying behaviour are punitive. Ironically, the message beneath the surface is that the right to bully is not so much wrong as it is reserved for those from the school authorities. Undercover Teams by contrast, use a relationally transformative and deeply respectful approach based on the principles of narrative mediation whereby those responsible for the bullying are recruited into a select team who make it their mission to interrupt bullying behaviours. This course uses real-life stories to describe how the school counsellor uses the Undercover Team Approach in a strategic way to disrupt a story of bullying relations in a secondary school classroom and rewrite an alternative story of support for the victim. It includes a description of the process beginning with the notification of the bullying event and describes the creation of the team. Its progress is tracked to show how the team eliminates the bullying. It shows how the Undercover Team Approach opens up an expanded range of positions for the members of the undercover team, how these changes occur and how the team members and the counsellor co-author a new story of peaceful relations in a high school classroom.