Interschool activities in Neyagawa city

In 2007, student council members met to discuss what they could do for their peers working as the Neyagawa Junior High School Summit. They created and distributed advocacy guidelines, including “tackling bullying.” Focusing on bullying issues, the students created a handwritten questionnaire on bullying and produced antibullying dramas. The DVD recordings of their dramas were distributed at all 12 Junior High School and 24 elementary schools in the city. This process was later used when students recognized that cyberbullying was a problem they wanted to tackle.

In Japan, 93.6% of high-school students and 45.8% of junior high-school students are now using smartphones (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, 2016). After another Neyagawa Junior High School Summit in 2009, the first author received numerous phone calls and emails from various organizations across Japan. The first author was told that they learned about the Summit through TV programs and newspaper articles. This way, news of the project was not disseminated through scientific papers or governmental initiatives, but through media coverage and online social networks.

Kansai Smartphone Summit

When asked what problem they wanted to address, children across the Kansai region suggested problems surrounding smartphones, including cyberbullying and “later bed times” (Lemola, Perkinson-Gloor, Brand, Dewald-Kaufmann, & Grob, 2015, p. 406), “meeting online contacts offline” (Livingstone, Haddon, Görzig, & Ólafsson, 2011, p. 5), “solicitation” (Smith, Thompson, & Davidson, 2014, p. 360), and purchasing “in-game contents” on online games (Hamari et al., 2017, p. 538). This was when the name was changed to the “Smartphone Summit.” Various organizations have sponsored the summits in every prefecture in the Kansai area, to meet the growing need for child-led rule-making on smartphone usage.

In 2010 in the Hyogo prefecture, city-level junior high-school summits emerged to share their experience and messages with the general public. Since 2014, the Kyoto Smartphone Summit has been sponsored by the Kyoto Prefectural Police. The Shiga Smartphone Summit has been funded by the Shiga Parent-Teacher Association. Osaka and Hyogo Smartphone Summits have been supported by the Departments of Youth Safety and Development in their respective prefectures. Wakayama and Nara prefectural Summits have been supported by their respective Boards of Education. Since 2015, integrating all these prefectural-level summits, the Kansai Smartphone Summit, sponsored by several prefectural Parent-Teacher Associations, has invited representative children from all six prefecture-level summits to share and spread the children's activities and messages.

Smartphone Summit in Okayama

The Smartphone Summit has also been implemented in the Okayama Prefecture. The Okayama Prefecture is located outside but near Kansai area, with a population of around 1.92 million. The Governor has focused on education policy, aiming to reduce problems in schools and improve students' academic achievement.

The Smartphone Summit in Okayama was organized by a newspaper company in conjunction with the Board of Education of both Okayama Prefecture and Okayama City. The newspaper company, the Sanyo Shimbun, is headquartered in Okayama city, with most subscribers in Okayama Prefecture. It had been looking for ideas how the media could contribute to protecting children from the harmful effects of the Internet and smartphones—in the wake of coverage of many problems concerning children.

The company came up with the idea of fostering children's ability to deal properly with the Internet and smartphones, and asked the first author to implement the Smartphone Summit there. The first author invited an external researcher who had not been involved in the former summits to assist in evaluating the practice. As the practice itself is different from most prevention programs, we next explain the frameworks of the Summit and describe our method of evaluating the practice in a manner that is consistent with the frameworks.

Cascade model for dissemination

Prevention programs are designed to change participants' behavior. This usually means that researchers develop a program and choose the participants, based on their school or class year to evaluate it. The Smartphone Summit practice differs from typical prevention programs in two ways. The Smartphone Summit seeks to not only change participants' behavior but also to empower them to change the climate and behavior of their peers. Moreover, participants are the students who actively express their interest to their teacher recruiters, which allows the program to boost their motivation to help peers. The implementation model of the ViSC program consists of a cascaded train-the-trainer model in which the program developers (researchers) train ViSC coaches (e.g., school psychologists, teacher trainers) who, in turn, train teachers, and then these teachers train their students (Strohmeier, Hoffmann, Schiller, Stefanek & Spiel, 2012). The Smartphone Summit however implemented a cascade of children's ideas to other children. In this model, children are not only recipients of the program but also active change agents. For this to be effective, it is important to select students who are popular not only among well-behaved students but also among less-compliant students. Identifying and promoting such students relies on the teachers' knowledge of their students' characteristics.

Interschool activity model

Most prevention programs are administered in individual schools that function independently. Even in multiple-schools' trials such as Sheffield project (Smith & Sharp, 1994), cooperation among the participant schools was rare. Recently, the KiVa program in Finland has biannual KiVa conference days where teachers from different schools exchange their experience and ideas for improving the program in each school (Salmivalli, Kärnä, & Poskiparta, 2010). Following this direction, as for the Smartphone Summit, all the schools in a city, or at least several schools, are invited to participate in the program. This kind of participation is actually an interschool activity. It is interesting to note that not all the schools in Neyagawa city attended the Summit from the beginning. The children met several times with some schools joining later.

In 2016, Smartphone Summits began to spread outside the Kansai region. At one Summit, a junior high-school student proposed “I want to talk with children in urban areas, to learn if they are using smartphones any differently.” Highlighting their curiosity to meet children of other regions, remarks like this led us to consider creating a space for interregional interactions.

To make this accessible to everyone interested, our approach in the future will be to use free video conferencing to connect multiple Summits. This will enable both children and adult supervisors to cut down costs while cultivating further collaboration between children in different parts of Japan. The children may even begin to tackle various types of inequalities between rural and urban areas, as students from different schools have addressed regional-scale challenges.

The framework of interschool activities has merits and challenges. According to the tradition of Japanese bullying, ijime research, ijime is considered to be “a disease of a class” (Morita & Kiyonaga, 1994, p. 181). This implies that if a certain class was affected by ijime, it would be difficult to change the situation from inside the class. Some kind of intervention from outside the class is necessary. For prevention, mutual influence between classes or even between schools would be effective for generating ideas and learning effective ways to work together. This is the underlying philosophy of this practice, which is particularly important in the case of cyberbullying, which is not confined to one school or class and easily crosses school boundaries.

Intergenerational collaboration

The Smartphone Summit includes participants of various ages. High-school students and junior high-school students, aged 12–18, work with each other, while university students facilitate their group discussions. These university students are supervised by a university faculty advisor.

The idea of such intergenerational collaboration comes from peer support practice; but in this instance, there are not only students and teachers but also other professionals who support children to come together and talk freely.

An interesting aspect of this approach is that some teachers and adults are now asking the children for advice and thanking them for getting hints about how to think about the problems. In many areas of life, adults are assumed to be more knowledgeable because they have acquired expertise throughout their lives. However, for smartphone usage, children are often much more experienced and skilled than adults who spent their younger days with a home telephone or old-style mobile phones. For smartphone knowledge and skills, the developmental order among adults and children generally does not reflect that adults know more than children. That is why adults are learning from children.

But adults can do more in their areas of expertise. The media report the children's activities and bring the idea to other schools and teachers. Children and parents are happy seeing their ideas on the news and local people are proud of the children. Some municipal assemblymen praised the activity to their local educational committee, saying, “We will raise the budget for the board of education.” Thanks to the free-of-charge programming lessons and coding guidance from a smartphone game company, children attendees at Osaka Smartphone Summit developed an Android app called “mom-app,” where a mother figure admonishes the user for excessive use of smartphones (The Asahi Shimbun Company, 2016).

Reflecting on the frameworks, we may define the Smartphone Summit as an interschool World Café meeting by intergenerational participants to disseminate safer usage of the Internet and Smartphone and reduce cyberbullying.

Any Smartphone Summit consists of a series of three meetings: (1) Introduction/idea meeting, (2) analysis/activity meeting, and (3) sharing/dissemination meeting. Here is one example of the meetings.

At the introduction/idea meeting, thirty or more junior- and high-school students from a variety of schools meet for the first time. The meeting lasts for 4 hours in the afternoon: 1 hour of icebreaker activities and the coordinator's presentation and 3 hours of group work. After the icebreaker activities, the coordinator talks briefly about the impact of technological advancement on our society. Then each student thinks about pros and cons of smartphone usage and writes them down on sticky notes. After that, they work in groups to categorize their notes. When all the groups, including one adult group, finishes presenting, every attendee votes to select the best presentation in the room. Once the winner is announced and all the groups' contributions are appraised, the students move on to discuss what they want to do to reduce cyberbullying and related problems for their peers. In the past, several students have volunteered to develop a questionnaire to investigate how their peers are using smartphones. Adults, including teachers, have distributed the students' handwritten questionnaire. Another time, a game company employee worked on data entry and the coordinator of the event prepared the survey results to be shown on slides.

One month later, they meet again for the analysis/activity meeting. The agenda consists of icebreakers, 2 hours of group work, 1 hour of lunch, and 1 hour of script writing and video writing. At one such meeting, survey results were available to the students. The students looked at graphs and discussed the analysis. Then, similar to the introduction/idea meeting, the groups took part in presentation tournaments. During that meeting, some students produced 30-second videos, with the university students' support who distributed them to all schools in the region. Before closing, each school came up with ideas for their own grassroots activities, such as writing theme songs and making posters, to work on for the next 6 months.

A variety of the following grassroots activities

After the analysis/activity meeting, students initiate various grassroots activities to convey what they learnt through the Summit. The reach of their messages can range from their immediate peers (Peer Impact) to younger children and parents (Intergenerational Impact).

Peer Impact initiatives have included organizing a poster competition at their own schools and making theme songs about safer and kinder smartphone use to be played between class periods. Intergenerational Impact projects have been that one high-school invited junior high-school students for a collaborative summit, under the university students' supervision. The junior high-school students created the Smartphone Guidelines to reduce cyberbullying and related problems, with the discussion facilitated by the high-school students. Another high school wanted to convey their messages to elementary-school children. Under the university students' guidance, the students visited local elementary schools and taught classes on how to use smartphones safely. The students noticed that the elementary-school children were not choosing to play except online. The university students allowed them to experience the playfulness of playing offline reminding the children of simple group plays and the enjoyment they had together at the end of each lesson. Furthermore, these high-school students educated parents of the young children. During their smartphone classes at a local elementary school, many children reported not using parental control service on their devices. Subscription to parental control, though optional, blocks the child's access to harmful websites. The high-school students knew this. Feeling energized by the meeting, they visited local cellphone stores to collect filtering service brochures for the parents of the younger pupils.

The Smartphone Summit day

Half a year later, students from several analysis/activity meetings gather at the sharing/dissemination meeting. This meeting serves as an opportunity for students to share their findings and grassroots activities. After presenting on their survey findings and grassroots activities, the student volunteers and adult representatives participate in a panel discussion. They share their opinions on the survey results. The students' honest voices sometimes astonish adults, but the coordinator helps adults understand the students' perspectives. At the end of one meeting, a student testified, “Although it is the one of the most important things for us, we don't talk about it at school. I really want to have a discussion like this regularly at school.” This meeting was featured in several newspaper articles and TV news programs.

As well as providing a platform for children to engage in discussions on the Internet and smartphone problems, the Smartphone Summit aims to facilitate interactive learning among adults and children. The following individuals from various organizations found the Summits effective in addressing the causes they work toward. A former head of a Parent-Teacher Association said, “Numerous parents learned from the voices of children at the Summits that smartphone problems can affect any child.” A Board of Education member stated, “Students' autonomous thinking about rules would help teachers be aware of and cope with the potential problems before they become too difficult to tackle.” A representative from a game company testified, “We believe it is crucial for users to gain knowledge on the Internet, like at the Summits.” A police officer said, “Continuing the Summits is effective in developing children's morality and ability to tackle the Internet problems.”

Preliminary evidence from Neyagawa city

The 2007 Neyagawa Junior High School Summit, a prototype of the Smartphone Summit model, offered preliminary but hard evidence of the effects of the summit. In order to assess the effect of the activities, the number of bullying cases in Neyagawa city reported in 2009 was compared with that of 2006. According to the statistics compiled by the Neyagawa City Board of Education, it was found that the number of bullying cases reported decreased from 58 to 30 (Takeuchi, 2010). Furthermore, the number of school absentees halved (Takeuchi, Aoyama, Kanayama, & Toda, 2012). There are no control groups to compare these results with, however, there are no such trends in the available nation-wide statistics from the Japanese Government.

Effects of practice

Statistical evidence might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for validating the impact of an educational program. Voices and actions of teachers, parents, and municipalities following the Summit illustrate the effect on them. Many parents, after reading the newspaper article about the Neyagawa Junior High School Summit, reported having discussed cellphone and cyberbullying problems with their children.

Furthermore, after the first author presented the idea of the summit at the Japan Peer Support Conference, many municipalities replicated the process. Although these pieces of qualitative evidence do not sufficiently prove that children changed because of the summit, the community in Japan viewed this model as a powerful, much-needed solution to the contemporary challenges of cyberbullying and other problems of smartphone use.

Because the summits are designed to inspire participants to initiate change in their schools, we developed a questionnaire to assess participants' beliefs about the impact of the summit on themselves and their classmates (Miyake, Takeuchi, & Toda, in preparation). The items described seven behaviors (see Fig. 16.2) in which they and their classmates might engage in the immediate future and longer term. Response options ranged from 1 (not at all) to 4 (extremely plausible).

Fig. 16.1 shows the overview of the structure of the questionnaire.

First, we examined whether the 26 male and female participants (almost all attendees) anticipated using the Internet and smartphones more appropriately in the future and whether their classmates would do so. Their responses showed that the participants expected their own and their classmates' anticipated future smartphone usage to be more appropriate than their present usage. Participants rated their classmates' future usage significantly better than their present usage concerning all items except for “respecting privacy” in the paired t-tests (p < .05). This indicates that the participants expect positive impacts of their grassroots activities on their classmates' anticipated smartphone usage. The tendency of expecting improved anticipated future usage than present usage was similar concerning their own usage. By joining in the Summit, the participants may have obtained efficacy to make an impact on their peers as well as a sense of confidence to improve their own future smartphone usage.

Second, in order to examine the patterns of participants' “impact expectation” toward their peers, we conducted a cluster analysis (Ward method) based on the total scores of their classmates' usage (present and anticipated future). The result revealed three groups of impact expectation toward their classmates (see Fig. 16.2.). The largest cluster (n = 13) was relatively moderate in their evaluation of their classmates for both present and anticipated future behavior. The second cluster (n = 8) showed relatively lower evaluation of classmates. The third cluster (n = 5) showed relatively higher evaluation. Fig. 16.2 also shows the ratings for participants' own present and anticipated future behavior by cluster. There was no significant difference among three clusters in the total scores of both present and anticipated future behavior of the respondents, in contrast to the significant differences among three clusters in the impact expectations for classmates.

However, some children are likely to have faced difficulties when they tried to share the activities with their classmates. Such participants might know the reasons for the difficulty of changing their classmates' behavior. For future verification of the effect of the Summit, it will be necessary to document how activities are expanded on in participants' own classrooms and how participants can be supported in implementing their ideas with possibly reluctant classmates.