My Daddy’s saving the world, what does yours do?

When my son was at Kindergarden he was asked what his daddy did for a job.

“He drinks coffee and sometimes hits the buttons on his desk,” he replied.

My son Henri is now in Grade 1 at primary school. As part of a school project, his class recently looked at different jobs in the community with help from the class parents. Policemen, firemen, builders, hairdressers, train drivers — even area planners — are quite easy to explain to a class of six year olds.

I thought, my position is so varied I’m not sure most of my colleagues here in the office know with 100% certainty what I do. So if they don’t know, how would I explain it to a class of first graders?

Just saying “I’m a Digital Communications Expert at GRID-Arendal” was not going to cut it and would fall on deaf ears. I had to break down my job to its core components and help the kids understand by using examples. So I invited the entire class to come to the GRID-Arendal office to introduce them to some of our experts. Since our communications team here at GRID-Arendal can’t communicate if we don’t have any information to share, I wanted to get this point across to the kids.

I went through what communication is and the basics of advertising. Trying to relate to them with things they knew, like remembering your favourite part of a TV ad and acting on it, is much easier to explain than showing scientific reports, websites, videos and explaining that we are trying to get policy makers to act on the information that we present.

The challenge was to present some of the big issues to the kids — climate change, ozone degradation and the problem of marine litter.

My colleague Steven Lutz leads our programme on Blue Carbon. He told the kids about coastal ecosystems, specifically coral reefs, highlighting the importance of a symbiotic ecosystem. It’s a pretty hard concept to convey to a class of 6 year olds but Steven had the fantastic idea to cut out some of the organisms within a coral reef from large pieces of cardboard. He then got the children to act out a small puppet show explaining the different rolls of the species showing how important they are.

The kids loved this and really got into it, running around the back of the corals, as small fish hiding from the predators, cleaning the teeth of a shark and so on.

When we spoke to the class about marine litter and the importance of picking up your trash, this seemed to really strike a chord. They were amazed that not only does litter kill marine life. Some fish eat the small pieces of plastic (known as microplastic) and while it doesn’t kill them, the plastic stays in the body of the fish and then ends up on our plates.

This had a big effect on the kids that after they returned to school they decided to draw pictures of what they had learned, some of which can be seen below.

From now on when somebody asks Henri, “What does your Daddy do for a job” he no longer thinks I just drink coffee. He knows his Daddy is helping to save the world.