Facilitating exploration in quest for brighter future

We are living through a time where global issues seem to be dominating our consciousness — the war (is it a war, or is it just one man’s folly?) in Iran, the wonder of the Artemis II mission.

My own relationship with news sometimes feels like a constant need to know how to prepare for the Next Thing. So hardwired am I for disaster that I felt the need to warn my children of the possibility of failure while we watched the peak of science, human ambition and curiosity flame into the sky and then into the blackness of space, deepening the knowledge and potential of humanity in real time. This may have been a bit of lingering trauma from a childhood vacation when I watched an unmanned rocket launch in Florida just months after the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The rocket was promptly struck by lightning and exploded across the sky. “These things sometimes blow up,” I told my kids.

So it’s understandable if, like me, in the unending barrage of existential crises emanating from these pages and your social media feeds, and the propensity for things to go wrong these days, you may have missed a very important story out of Calgary this week.

So I will fill you in: In a calculated and strategic effort, the University of Calgary has broken a Guinness world record for the most people dressed as dinosaurs at one time. Now, lest you think this is minor news, I would encourage you to read the article and note the deliberateness with which this record was achieved, down to learning from the failed attempts of the dinosaur capital of Canada, Drumheller, Alta.

I was delighted to see this story, as it’s an instant candidate for a page on the Free Press Media Literacy and Learning site: News for young children. Curating this page has become a unique joy for me, not only because I get to exalt stories like this one coming out of Calgary, but because it invites children to wonder at the world, and to begin to understand the kinds of things that make up “news,” without having to expose them to some of the other developments we adults tend to want and need to know in our community and our world.

How do caterpillars support the environment? When is it important to stop what you’re doing and do the right thing? Who is involved in caring for people living in poverty? What’s happening in different neighbourhoods and regions of our province? What does all this say about who we are and what we can do to change things for the better?

In conversations about the Media Literacy project, folks assume it is geared toward children in grades seven to 12. After all, how could a third-grader possibly interact with the news? But what I’ve seen from working with the children themselves is that an invitation to interact with news content is an invitation into the world of information from which their adults usually try to shield them. It’s an invitation to intrigue. Exploring the world around them is what kids are hard-wired to do, and giving them a place to broaden that exploration is a great honour and a great joy.

When school groups come through our newsroom for a tour, we place a newspaper in their hands. They learn how it’s organized, and they meet the people who make the decisions about what goes in it and how the stories are told. The space between the writers and the young readers collapses. Conversations with the press operators over the hum of the big machines create ink-stained heroes. The importance and significance of the paper they hold deepens as they travel through our building with us.

News is not just stories of conquest and warfare, crime and punishment. There are more than 400 stories on the webpage dedicated to news for young children. Hundreds of points of access to ask questions and share wonder about our world.

Even an article about dinosaur costumes can get us to wonder: how far could I go? What record could I break? What new experience could I provide for the people in my community? And how could I broaden that impact to benefit humanity? It’s questions like these that are the fruit of a child’s knowledge of news and current events. And it’s the answers to these questions that keep us pushing ever outward, like Artemis II and in countless other ways, in our quest for a better future.

winnipegfreepress.com/rebeccachambers