Activities

Educators, through Healthy Living education, have the capacity to foster an atmosphere of trust and provide a safe space in which students can learn and have conversations about gender-based violence and acquire the skills needed to prevent and/or intervene in situations involving gender-based violence.

Gender-based violence and harassment prevention education encompasses a variety of topics included in the Healthy Living Strand of The Ontario Curriculum, Health and Physical Education Grades 1–8 (2019) and The Ontario Curriculum, Health and Physical Education, Grades 9–12 (2015). These topics include:

  • Characteristics of a healthy relationship
  • Warning signs of an unhealthy relationship
  • The concept of consent and respect for others
  • Internal and external factors that affect a person’s feelings
  • How a person’s body and brain respond to challenging or uncomfortable situations
  • The connections between gender-based violence, an individual’s mental health, and mental illness
  • Bullying, relationship violence, abuse, exploitation, harassment, and other forms of gender-based and identity-based bullying
  • How to recognize and respond to coercive, inappropriate, and non-consensual sexual behaviours, including the role of bystanders in preventing gender-based violence and harassment

This resource uses three of the Draw the Line campaign scenarios to address the knowledge and skills students are to acquire as part of the Social-Emotional Learning Skills and Healthy Living expectations for Grades 7 and 8 as described in The Ontario Curriculum, Health and Physical Education, Grades 1–8 (2019) and as part of the Living Skills and Healthy Living expectations for Grade 9 as described in The Ontario Curriculum, Health and Physical Education, Grades 9–12 (2015).

Curriculum Expectations:

  • Grade 7: A1.1, A1.2, A1.3, A1.4, A1.5, A1.6; D1.3, D2.4, D3.3
  • Grade 8: A1.1, A1.2, A1.3, A1.4, A1.5, A1.6; D1.4, D1.5, D2.4, D3.2, D3.3
  • Grade 9: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5; C1.2, C1.5, C2.2, C2.3, C3.2, C3.3

Educators may consider reviewing other Draw the Line scenarios to adapt or extend the learning in order to focus on different student interests and needs. These activities may also be adapted for use with different scenarios to address learning in other grades.

Each activity includes a worksheet with guiding questions that promote thoughtful discussion about the issues of gender-based violence and harassment. Students can use the questions to focus their conversations, think critically about the scenario in the activity and uncover the root issue in it, and analyze their responses as bystanders. Unpacking the scenarios through critical thinking, group dialogue, and individual reflection leads students to examine their proposed actions as bystanders from moral and ethical stances and generate solutions about how to safely and reasonably respond such a scenario. Each Draw the Line scenario also contains a summary about the importance of Why, When, and How to Draw the Line, including multiple reasonable options for bystander intervention.

Activities