On June 16, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ held the 14th CC Academy webinar hosted on the VK-platform Safe Information Environment for Children. During the livestream, specialists and partners of the CC Academy discussed social and educational initiatives to improve digital literacy and culture, as well as information security.
The guest speaker, children’s poet Nadezhda Kuznetsova, shared her insights with the audience. She is president of the Nadezhda Foundation that supports and promotes children’s literature, a member of the children's literature commission at the Union of Russian Writers and holder of the medal For Contribution to Culture and Art.
This spring, the foundation she heads became a partner of the 8th Russian Family IT Marathon – a regular event held by the Coordination Center, co-organized with the Academy of Innovative Education and Development and dedicated to technologies in education. In addition to the main prizes, the Foundation presented the winners with copies of We Must Remember, collected poetry and prose about the Great Patriotic War by 20th-century classics and modern authors.
In addition to Nadezhda’s work and the Foundation’s activities, she discussed with her audience how children’s books contribute to the information environment. According to Nadezhda, the information environment is largely shaped by the content consumer: the depth and diversity of an individual’s media and digital environment is influenced by that individual’s worldview, habits, intelligence and the company they keep.
The participants jointly arrived at the conclusion that children’s books, as one of the primary sources of information and knowledge in a person’s life, can serve several key roles:
- Educational: Fairy tales, stories, and poems introduce children to the world around them, spurring imagination and cognitive development.
- Entertaining: Engaging content nurtures creativity and strengthens analytical skills.
- Moral guidance: Stories help shape ethical standards and values.
In particular, children’s books offer value-based lessons and social understanding, helping to foster safe behavior – both in the physical world and online. Fairy tales give a child their first ideas about good and evil, honesty and deception; the child can later extend these concepts to the digital world and rely on them to distinguish between useful and harmful content. Reading books helps children analyze characters’ actions, evaluate consequences, and make informed decisions, thereby fostering critical thinking skills. Finally, cultivating an interest in quality literature can reduce the risk of excessive reliance on social media or video games.
For more insights on children’s literature in the context of a safe information environment, watch the webinar recording here:
All previous CC Academy webinars from the Safe Information Environment for Children series are available in the Coordination Center’s official VK community. The information partner of the project is the .ДЕТИ domain.
