NSHS

The restrictions of COVID-19 helped us in becoming more creative in finding ways to think outside the box and connect with our peers.
 
For our project, we decided that it would be easiest to use technology as our medium for spreading our message due to our school being held fully virtual. We wanted to make a video with which we could advocate for the elimination of child labor while also showing examples of it in our community. We mainly focused on the fashion industry and the fast food industry and where child labor presents itself there. Since most of what we were presenting was facts, we decided to make stop motion videos with a voice over, so that the key facts would stand out more and it would be more eye catching. In addition, we also chose to use some live footage that we were able to find detailing the conditions of these factories. We divided the video up into three parts, 1) child labor in the fashion industry, explaining what local actions such as upcycling, thrifting and researching stores can be used to eliminate child labor, 2) child labor in the fast food industry, and 3) details of the labor laws here in Massachusetts. Overall, our goal was to educate our classmates on the realities of child labor around the world and what that means for us locally. In addition, we wanted to give them some methods that they could implement in our community to help reduce waste and also be smart about what buy and where they shop. Our video was shown to the entire school during community blocks. After the video, we supplied a few discussion questions so that the video could then foster a discussion between the people in those classes. Lastly, we sent out a survey asking questions such as how the video impacted their worldview, and about steps that they plan to take in the future to do their part in reducing and eliminating child labor.
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Since the conference was held virtually this year, we wanted to be sure that participants from all countries would be able to access the summary video of our project that was shared during the conference. Though the conference is held in English, we recognized that our international peer have different levels of English proficiency. So we translated our video into Spanish, while our teacher leader also translated our video into Portuguese, and were able to provide others with options for closed captioning.