By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 22 2000 (IPS)

Some 60 schoolchildren in the city of Río Grande, in Argentina’s southernmost province of Tierra del Fuego, are learning and growing as they run their own radio station with a variety of programmes produced in their school.

The idea to create the station, named “Chicos al Ataque”, was first conceived in 1994. But the station began to function in 1998, in school number 28.

Teachers at the school see communication as an essential element of the educational process, and wanted to provide another indoor activity involving learning in a place where temperatures drop to 20 below (celsius) in winter, and winds blow up to 100 kms an hour even in the summertime.

From the studio located in the school itself, the station broadcasts to the entire town from 12:30 to 15:30 (local time) every weekday.

“The kids only have to cross the courtyard to get to the broadcasting studio, and they are free to do so during recess and during classtime, in accordance with the study plan,” the project coordinator, Graciela Fucks, told IPS.

Río Grande, the largest city in the province of Tierra del Fuego, is located some 200 kms north of Ushuaia, the capital of the province. Most of the province’s 100,000 residents live in Río Grande, located on the northeastern seaboard of the island of Tierra del Fuego, and in Ushuaia, on the Beagle Channel.

The western half of the island of Tierra del Fuego belongs to Chile.

The town grew with the influx of people from other parts of Argentina seeking jobs and better working conditions in the 1980s, when laws designed to stimulate development of industry led national and foreign companies to set up shop at the southern tip of the Americas.

But the laws were overturned, and Río Grande was left to its own devices.

The situation also affected school number 28, which was absorbed by another school this year.

“We fought it, but it was useless. The school had less than the 750 students set as a minimum by the new law,” said Fucks. She added, however, that luckily the radio station continued to operate in the new facilities, because the project was defended by students and parents alike.

Fucks, who is originally from the province of Entre Ríos, 3,000 kms north of Río Grande, came up with the idea along with other teachers. She said the project was met with “incredible enthusiasm” by students, their families and the rest of the local community.

So it is no longer surprising when adult listeners who are not even relatives of the school’s students call in to ask, for example, for a repeat of information provided by the station’s “Employment Bureau” programme.

The programmes produced by students of all ages are aired during classtime, because they cover subjects that form part of the curriculum, although in a more attractive format, said Fucks.

“It is not necessary to explain that for the kids, this is a fascinating exercise,” she pointed out. “There is no resistance to learning when the radio station is involved.”

The subjects are first studied in class with the teacher before they are presented on the radio. With the question of organ transplants in human beings, for example, the student communicators read about and discussed the issue before inviting a doctor to the studio.

The daily programming opens with “Headline News”, in which sixth graders read local and national newspapers, which they access through the Internet, and comment on current events in the fields of politics, economics, international news and science and technology.

Weekly programmes then follow, focusing on the environment and natural sciences, education in ethics and citizenship, health, and various genres of literature in which fourth graders read stories and put on radio plays.

One popular programme covers cooking – not recipes, but information on nutrition.

“The aim of the project is to shape people able to participate in communication situations of growing degrees of complexity,” such as “explaining an idea, taking part in a debate, expounding an opinion, critically analysing the ideas of others, and framing appropriate questions,” said Fucks.

The project is also aimed at getting children interested in reading for enjoyment, learning and to stay informed, to help them recognise the particular characteristics of each genre of literature, and especially to “build a bridge to the parents and the community, with respect to the school and education in general,” she added.

The teacher said the goals had been “amply achieved” in terms of the development of the “young radio announcers,” who fight to reach school first to read the newspapers in order to win the right to sit by the microphone and read and comment on the news.

“In the past couple of years, some kids have discovered a vocation for working in the media, and we have gotten shy students, with major communication difficulties, to express themselves over the radio,” said Fucks.

One nine-year-old girl with a serious hearing impairment was motivated to do her phonic-audiological exercises so she could read a poem on the air during the programme “Growing Up With Poems” produced by her fellow fourth-graders. The programme was awarded a prize by the Society of Argentine Poets.

Fucks explained that “the weather conditions here mean kids spend most of their time shut up in their homes, although there are times when they can enjoy playing in the street or their yards.”

The radio station, which hopes to obtain more equipment and expand its programming time this year, thus provides another space for play and learning, in which students grow along with the rest of the community, to which they now feel even more connected through this novel undertaking.

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