Educational Media Reviews Online

Hazing and Harassment includes many examples of hazing, including reasons for hazing and its connection to gender, sexual assault, bullying, and alcohol. In this program, a very serious topic is successfully addressed with interviews and dramatic reenactments. The video’s strengths are the interviews with hazing researchers and the inclusion of students’ viewpoints on hazing. Interviews with two hazing scholars and a panel of high school and college students form the basis of the program. Reenactments increase the viewer’s ability to understand hazing.

The DVD’s program guide identifies several learning objectives. The video, combined with numerous fact sheets and student activities, achieve all of the stated objectives. For example, one of the objectives is to identify the different roles that individuals play in hazing. An interviewee achieves this goal by explaining the role of the victim and the group members who carry out the act. Hazing is compared to bullying, but curiously one of the words in the title, “harassment,” is never addressed which can mislead viewers.

Teachers will benefit from using the suggested student activities because most of them involve students in higher-order learning. Example lesson plans include group activities where students think critically about how they define hazing, how to create a local policy statement, acting out hazing scenarios, and guidelines for creating a local hazing policy including researching existing school, county, or state policies. Highly recommended for public and school libraries, as well as academic libraries with K-12 curriculum collections.