“Am I going to be the first Swedish student who gets to write for Healthy NewsWorks?” asked one of Mr. Coleman’s students from Colegio Nueva Granada, an international school in Bogota, Colombia.
In fact, Emilia was. This spring, Healthy NewsWorks partnered with fourth graders at Colegio Nueva Granada (known as CNG) and their teacher, Ben Coleman, a Philadelphia native who wanted to integrate media literacy and journalistic writing skills into his curriculum.
CNG is an international school located in the dynamic urban center of Bogota, the capital of Colombia and the country’s largest city. The school is nestled in the natural beauty of the Andes Mountains that form the eastern border of the city. Students at CNG come from more than 50 countries, including the United States, Sweden, Australia, and Guatemala.
Mr. Coleman decided to partner with Healthy NewsWorks to publish stories about health topics most important to the students in his class. “I’ve always loved working with kids,” he said. A fluent Spanish speaker whose first job after college was as a teacher in Spain, he’s found a home in the world of international education. At CNG, he teaches an American curriculum to students from all over the world.
“This year I had my most international class,” said Mr. Coleman. The U.S. embassy in Bogota is a major source of the diversity in nationality among Mr. Coleman’s students, and they are very attuned both to local and international issues.
The Healthy NewsWorks curriculum helped Mr. Coleman show his students the real-world application of skills like sourcing. “If you’re using a source and you’re using someone else’s words, you’d have to cite it,” said Mr. Coleman. Teaching them this skill through the lens of their own health news articles on a topic they cared about helped them understand the importance of finding trustworthy sources and quoting and crediting them appropriately.
“I encouraged them to talk about something locally,” says Mr. Coleman, though they could choose any health topic that excited them for their stories. And from there, “they just went with it.” He could have never imagined where their imaginations would take them.
One student wrote about Ciclovia, a program in Bogota that closes down streets to cars on Sundays so that children can play. Another wrote about drought in Bogota and water rationing. Others wrote about more universal issues, like the importance of movement and exercise and caring for the health of pets, which are now published on our By Kids, For Kids platform.
You can read select stories from our Bogota international correspondents here.
Illustration by a Colegio Nueva Granada reporter.
