Empowering Pre-Service Teachers to Address Bullying Through Building Understanding of the Peer Social Dynamic: A Retrospective Case Study

Abstract Providing pre-service teachers (PSTs) with the knowledges and practical skills required to address bullying is an important aspect of any whole-of-community/education response. However, initial teacher education (ITE) programs are largely concerned with acquiring skills/knowledges concerning what (curriculum) and how (pedagogy) to teach; with less or little emphasis on learning about whom they will teach : the students, peers and their social dynamic/context. This paper reports on the impact of a long-standing Australian ITE course designed to: specifically address this gap and position PSTs to have confidence and competence in addressing bullying as beginning teachers. Through exploring peer relationships more broadly, PSTs’ learning about bullying is positioned as a component of complex social relationships/contexts, rather than as a separate behavior to be ‘managed’. A convergent, mixed method retrospective case study examined four data sets from PSTs who had completed the elective course as part of their four-year undergraduate education degree program.: archived anonymous course evaluations (2014–2023, N = 288); a purposive pre-post class survey (2005, N = 21); and “exit comments” from 2017 ( N = 146) and 2023 ( N = 143). A purposive, convenience sample of current in-service teachers (ISTs, N = 15) who had completed the course previously, provided reflections on the impact of it on their practice. Embedding learning about bullying within the theoretical, developmental and practical contexts of broader peer social dynamics, had immediate, consistent, positive impacts on PSTs’ attitudes, beliefs, desire, confidence and perceived capacity to address bullying. Importantly, ISTs reported this impact had been sustained for many years following . Implications for ITE and whole of education (WoE) approaches to address bullying are discussed.