Photo: Jeremy Klaszus

A side quest at Calgary city hall

Thinking through local issues with students.

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When I go to city hall, my work often takes me to council chambers.

But this month has taken me to a different room in a side quest of sorts. And given everything going on in the world right now, it's been a welcome exploration.

Over the last couple weeks, I've been doing a few sessions with Grade 5/6 classes at City Hall School. This is a program where local classes come to city hall for a week—arriving from their school each day via city transit bus!—and learn about municipal government and what it means to be an engaged local citizen.

I have often seen classes in City Hall School, from the atrium, and thought: here is an opportunity to get kids thinking about local journalism and what they see or hear on the news (or don't!). I suggested a few ideas to the coordinator at City Hall School a few months ago and off we went.

For my first session there, I showed students a CTV story on a contentious redevelopment that recently went before city council. We discussed the issues at play, the arguments for and against the project. Then I brought the class along to an interview I had scheduled with a city councillor about it for the next Sprawlcast.

My thinking was to give the students a behind-the-scenes sense of how the news gets made—and to involve them in it, too.

So we held a media "scrum" just outside council chambers, which is where actual media scrums take place. I asked a few questions and then the students jumped in with questions of their own.

Our media scrum at city hall. Photo: Jenelle de Jesus

We brainstormed questions together beforehand. Among them: What do you do when one group of constituents wants you to vote no on something, and another wants you to vote yes? How do you weigh competing demands? How do you decide?

Being a journalist, I told the students, is largely about being curious. You can't go into a story with your mind made up. You have to be open to new information and actively seek it out. If you do, you'll often be surprised by what you find.

And then, after you research, you publish. Sam Hester drew up a zine template specifically for this purpose—so students could report on what they learned at city hall.

There was one subterranean finding at city hall that clearly captured students' imaginations. An abandoned transit project from the 1980s that has been a source of local intrigue since. These zine panels from Ella, Isabella, Fletcher and Oscar will tell you more:

The kids are alright, I tell you!

Incidentally, as LiveWire Calgary reported earlier this month, the Alberta government has also shown recent interest in that abandoned CTrain station under city hall, considering its potential use in the context of the Green Line. But that's another story.

I also brought my pop-up press to City Hall School so the students could do some hands-on letterpress printing and experience how newspapers and books used to be made.

All told, it was a lot of fun and a useful prototype. I've got some ideas for how to sharpen these sessions further and experiment with some audio reporting as well. But that's for next time.

To be honest I've found this kind of civic engagement work to be really invigorating, especially now. When I go online, whether I'm reading news or social media, I get miserable pretty quickly. It hollows me out. This does the opposite. And so I plan to continue following this side quest—and seeing where it leads.

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.

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