Take a Stand Against Child Labour!!

Take a Stand Against Child Labour

For our project my group decided to focus on child labour, because as Early Childhood Education students we are obviously interested in protecting the rights of children, no matter where they live. Although we were able to easily decide on a topic, we had a lot of back and forth discussion on what our "Big Idea" could be, and how to relate it to art and creativity. After looking into all the statistics and facts we realized that child labour is still a very large issue, and there really is not enough recognition in it. We realized that although we thought the most obvious solution was to simply boycott companies who supported child labour, such as disney, nike, fisher price, the gap etc. But upon further research we actually found that the most promising solution was to simply raise awareness about companies and organizations who are trying to stop it, such as Fair Trade and Unicef. We decided that our Big Idea would be to use a facebook page to start a T-Shirt competition. People would submit their ideas and designs for T-shirts that raise awareness on the issue. That way people will get involved in the issue and help support it by using their creativity. 

We will involve a local Toronto company who uses organic companies to print the design of the winner. We will also ask Unicef to help sponsor us and post our competition on their website. We will persuade these companies by advertising their business on our facebook page and also by contributing all of the profits to the Unicef organization.

After presenting our idea to the class and seeing the other presentations I was proud of the job that we did. I think we had a very informative presentation and were able to incorporate the arts into our presentation. I thought our hand-outs to the class were really well done because we decided to make little t-shirts with hand prints that had five facts about child labour. This went really well with our idea, which was to create a design t-shirt competition to help raise awareness. Our handout was a design with awareness on it.

 One disappointing part of the experience was that we were pressed for time so we were unable to actually recieve any comments or feedback from the class. The one comment we did receive was from the Professor, and she asked us how we would advertise our competition. We explained that we would do it through online media such as facebook and through word of mouth.

If we were to do this project over I think we would need to have more ideas on how to advertise our idea, such as posting it around the school or in public areas in Toronto. Though I do think word of mouth can work, I think it is much slower and by advertising to the public the information can get out a lot faster and to a whole lot more people.

I really enjoyed doing this project and I think it is greatly beneficial for Early Childhood Education because it taught me that when you believe in an issue you can really make a difference. It inspires me as a future teacher to use art and creativity as a way to get children to involve themselves in social issues that need attention. It also teaches children that anyone can make a difference. Using creativity is a great way to express your own desires as well as inspire others to make a difference as well.