I’ve spent a lot of time working with kids in the past. I work as a summer camp leader, volunteer as a coach, and have volunteered my time with various other community initiaves such as teaching kids to read. One thing which I’ve always noticed is how kids understand more then we give them credit for. They see and understand various issues plaguing our world such as conflict, climate change, and intolerance. While they might not understand the more refined points of these issues, they certainly can understand a basic perspective on it.
In our recent project we worked with grade 4/5 children on teaching them the importance of tolerance. Our final product was a picutre book depiciting inclusion, tolerance, or the negative consequences of intolerance. Early on in the project we met with the children to see what kind of knowledge and perspective they had on intolerance. It was interesting to see how they grouped everything from massive historical cases of extreme intolerance and prejudice such as segregation and the holocaust, with more personal events like when they got excluded from playing tag. My biggest take away was the importance of a personalized story in order to get the kids to connect and understand the message of any story.
Three Villages, One River Three Villages One River
Creating this story was challening, I came up with countless ideas, and tried many differnet methods of illustration. I started with a variety of different stories about the importance of inlcusions within sports. I tried to write a story about the importance of accepting everyone, regardless of their lifestlye. However I ended up using a topic which is very important to me personally, conservation. My strory was about the importance of working with people with a variety of perspectives and lifeways to conserve natural places and resources.
Between my parents work, interviewing people in fields I’m interested in working in, and just spending time outside, I have seen all kinds of issues with our methods of conservation. Everyone seems to think they know best, whether it’s the scientists, farmers, business’s, government, indigenous nations, etc. No one seems to be willing to combine their ideas and come up with compromises. I truly believe if we all share our knowledge and strategies, coming up with compromises and methods which work for everyone, we can save our planet.
This project was also, a great chance for me to practice responsible use of AI. I ended up using a platform known as Storyspark.ai. It was interesting way to see how AI can be used to assist in areas of work we might not be the best at. I wrote the story myself, and then used the platform to generate the images. Additionally it gave me some good ideas as to how I could edit the story to make it more cohesive in a short 25 page book. Going forward I will be looking as to more ways to use AI to help me overcome weaknesses in my work, and let my strengths shine through.
At the start of the project we studied one of the most widespread and detrimental examples of intolerance, nazi Germany. Watching testimonies from the Stephen Spielberg Foundation, visiting the Vancouver Holocaust Museum, and reading a firsthand account of the damaging effects of the holocaust on jewish identity. Further studying this topics, something we have revisited many times in the past three years, really challenged me to think about how this intolerance spread so quickly. We had a discussion about how similar examples of intolerance were spreading in our modern world, on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, we sadly saw many parallels between the attitudes directed at minorities found in Germany in the 1920s/1930s in Canada and the US today.
“How is storytelling an effective weapon against hate?” We started investigating the answer to this by watching a documentary about Mr Rogers. We saw the impact he was able to create, spreading messages of tolerance and acceptance. We can see this even online with the recent BLM protests and how effective many stories were from black Canadians and Americans. Even the BCFP (BC First Peoples) course I took last year showcased this point when we read stories, and watched testimonies from indigenous peoples about their experience in residential schools. I think storytelling is an effective weapon against hate because it allows the audience to see the victims as people in their own right, not just names in a textbook or part of a statistic. At the end of the day the vast majority of us don’t want to cause harm to other humans, if we can connect with victims of intolerance, hopefully we can stop hate and intolerance across Canada and the world.
This project involved all the main elements of a PLP project, sudden changes in direction, FAILS, and changing the entire story, the night before the project was due (I try to say this won’t happen every project, but inevitably, my best ideas come in the last 24-48 hours). I learned a lot from this project and hope our stories made an impact on these kids.