The topic of this Master's thesis is online violence in primary schools. The thesis focuses on teachers and their management of the phenomenon of online violence among pupils.
The theoretical part of the thesis starts with the definitions of concepts of violence and peer violence, as these concepts are crucial to understand and explain the thesis' main concept of online violence. The thesis describes antecedents of violent acts, roles of various persons involved in the act of violence, as well as various types and forms of violence. The central part of the thesis focuses on various definitions and characteristics of online violence and discusses differences between online and classical violence. The thesis further analyses the use of the Internet among children and adolescents, including also the findings of three major studies conducted in Slovenia. The thesis presents potential preventive actions that can be taken by schools, teachers, parents, and children themselves. The theoretical part concludes with the description of action taken when it does come to peer violence, by teachers, school management, parents, and children.
The empirical part consists of a quantitative and a qualitative research. The qualitative research is an analysis of six randomly chosen educational plans of Slovenian primary schools. The analysis examines the values that the schools advocate, the educational and prevention measures, as well as the inclusion of violence and online violence-related topics into the curriculum. The quantitative research was conducted among primary schools teachers on the elementary level. This research showed how teachers are equipped to discover and solve acts of online violence among pupils. The aim of the studies was to discover the extent of online violence detected by the teachers and to examine the reaction of teachers on such violence.
The analysis of educational plans revealed that the plans mostly do not address topics related to the online violence, neither do schools conduct educational activities on online violence. However, all 6 plans do include policy against peer violence.
All teachers in the survey recognize that pupils of third, fourth and fifth class (aged 8-10 years) use the Internet. Most of the teachers believe that their pupils use the Internet daily. The results show that more than a half of the teachers have not yet witnesses online violence among their pupils. The teachers in the survey also report that they do not feel competent to detect and solve online violence, and report that the school management has not given them guidance on how to react when there are signs of online violence. Most of the surveyed teachers do feel responsible to act and solve problems related to the online violence, even though such violence mostly happens in the afternoon outside of schools.
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