Just Chill!: Dealing With Anger.

Abstract

Just Chill!: Dealing With Anger (Videotape, 36 minutes, $199.95), produced by Young Brothers and Sisters; Real People: Stop the Violence! (Videotape, 28 minutes, $189.95), produced by Rebecca Goalby Fisher; Respect: Keep It Real (Videotape, 25 minutes, $189.95), produced by Young Brothers and Sisters; and Silence the Violence: Skills for Prevention (Videotape, 20 minutes, $169.95), produced by Young Brothers and Sisters. Pleasantville, NY: Sunburst Communications, 1995. (Available from Sunburst Communications, 101 Castleton Street, Pleasantville, NY 10570) Making Our Neighborhoods Safe (Videotape, 30 minutes, $89.95), produced/directed by Catherine Tatge; and Rebuilding Communities (Videotape, 30 minutes, $89.95), produced//directed by Catherine Tatge. Monmouth Junction, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1995. (Available from Films for the Humanities and Sciences, P.O. Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543-2053) Reviewed by Gerunda B. Hughes, School of Education, Howard University. As the incidence of violence escalates throughout American society generally and in its urban neighborhoods in particular, concerned parents, community leaders, and school personnel are avidly seeking to understand the root causes of violence and apply workable strategies to reduce or prevent its occurrence. Although these two video series are intended for different audiences and offer different approaches to getting the word out about violence, they each provide a wealth of knowledge and practical advice on ways to curtail the incidence of violence in our nation's neighborhoods, streets, homes, and schools. Through them, teens, educators, community leaders, and violence prevention program staff present their perspectives on the impact of violence in society and ways to address its consequences. The Sunburst Communications series is directed at adolescents and teens. These videotapes make effective use of dramatized vignettes that explore settings, situations, characters, and language with which many urban youth can identify and relate. Additionally, each videotape is accompanied by a teacher's guide that outlines learning objectives and includes both the script and a summary of the action as well as questions for discussion, suggested activities, and a resource bibliography. The guides explain what students should learn as a result of viewing and discussing the videotapes and provide a framework for assessing how well the learning objectives were accomplished. Their suggested activities are designed to help students personalize the information and apply the concepts depicted in the vignettes to their own lives. The importance of Just Chill! Dealing with Anger, lies in the frankness with which this video-presentation addresses one of the most difficult challenges teenagers face: coping with extreme emotions from joy to frustration to anger. As it points out, failure among teens and young adults to successfully deal with anger has led to its extreme outcome, violence, becoming the second leading cause of injury-related deaths among adolescents, and the leading cause of death among African Americans aged 15 to 34. Consequently, this video helps teens to recognize their own anger and learn how to control the way they express it in order to avoid its destructive and self-defeating consequences. Real People: Stop the Violence! opens with a graphic illustration of the number of youths killed daily as a result of violence, depicting students in a high school assembly standing among their seated peers to represent these victims. It goes on to present an overview of the problem of violence and its impact on people and the communities in which they live. Role-playing segments are also used to demonstrate issues related to gangs, weapons, substance use, and racism. Other segments allow real victims to describe how a single momentary act of violence changed their lives forever and focus on the successes of a campus mediation program in which student mediators and other students engage in a nonviolent conflict resolution session. …