Manitoba students explore human rights through art

Ten-year-old Ross Wilder may not know everything about human rights, but he does know a child should never be forced to carry a gun. 

Wilder is in Grade 5 at Laidlaw School in the Pembina Trails School Division and is part of a massive division-wide art project to express what human rights means to the students. Each child will create an eight-by-10 inch panel using multimedia, inspired by an article from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child. 

Wilder chose to depict Article 38, which reads, in his words, "no child should take [part] in war. No child under 15 should be involved in war."

"Kids under 10, or like, young kids, should be doing, having fun, playing and not going out into a place not so happy, gloomy, dark, with a weapon and trying to hurt other people, when they're like, they shouldn't be doing that," Ross said. "I can represent this article and try to stop it."

Students, 13,000 in 33 Manitoba schools, are taking part in this project, making it the largest initiative in the school division’s history.

The students will each place their panel on Investors Group Field in the shape of the international logo for human rights. This enormous art installation will take up close to half of the football field, making this a unique exercise in students expressing their view on human rights though the arts. 

"The arts are an important way to engage kids and get them thinking about things, perhaps even on a deeper level,” said Cameron Cross, visual arts consultant to the Pembina Trails School Division. “The idea of the art installation is to bring people together in a collaborative way to form something that's visual.”

And that teaching has inspired Wilder. 

"To be studying human rights is important to kids, so they can learn what we can do to stop what is going on the world," said Wilder. 

You can view the completed Pembina Trails human rights project on May 21 from 3:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at Investors Group Field.