GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A group of students at Harrison Park Academy got the opportunity to ask U.S. Representative Hillary Scholten hard-hitting questions this week.
It’s all part of a program bringing art and technology to West Michigan.
“It's like exciting because, with technology, you can have a lot of power. Because you can learn new things," Nathan Hensler, a student at Harrison Park Academy, said.
The would-be journalists are working with staff from the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology (WMCAT).
“They have been asking deep questions about you know, what, what do I want to know about my school? What is important to me about my community? What is important to me about my family, and then they're using arts to explore those ideas," Michael Saunders, program manager at WMCAT, said.
Among the many skills students are learning is documentary filmmaking.
The sixth graders chose politics as their topic of exploration, and the ideal subject to interview was the first mom to represent West Michigan in Congress.
“It is so important to me that our young people, the next generation, knows that they have a representative that is responsive and engaged to them," Scholten said.
Their teacher says it's important that the students learn that education can happen in more than one format, including outside the classroom.
"There are futures for them that they don't know about that. There's so much that they don't know. I want to keep on turning over stones that they're going to be able to see 'oh, I can do this. I can do that,'" Maximillian Young, a sixth-grade teacher at Harrison Park Academy, said.
By the end of the school year, the students will be able to take home an artifact of their hard work.
The ultimate goal for students is to discover what Harrison and the community mean to them.
"We moved to place to place and I feel like this is like the most important one here because I feel like I belong here," Pedro Diego Jose, a student, said.
A lesson well learned.
At the end of the school year, there will be an exhibition at WMCAT where students get to showcase the work they did during this year-long collaboration.
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