Albertans & Identity – This Land Is Us Project Reflection

Hi! It’s Alex and welcome back to my blog! This project’s driving question was “How Does Place Impact Who We Are?” And, to answer this question, we went through this whole project and went to do a nine day trip to Alberta! 

Milestone 1: Power Of Place

To start off our project we first explored deeply into what place means to us and how it impacts us.

To reflect on this activity, we completed a “Creative Response”. Here is mine!

I think that I did a pretty good job on my creative response because it was nice and organized and represented the assignment very well. 

Milestone 2: Using A Lens

Next, we learned about looking at things in a different perspective, which we call, using a lens. The different types of lenses were Political, Economical, Geographical/Environmental and Social. To practice our lens using skills, we were put into groups and were assigned an article that described a recent event. My group was assigned the event on the Trans-Mountain pipeline with Alberta having a great dispute with British Columbia. Here was how mine turned out:

Since I chose to use an economical lens for this activity, I was able to find lots of examples on how the pipeline impacts the world economically. Therefore, it was a little easier for me to do this activity. I think I did a pretty good job at it still; it was the perfect length, had great examples and was formatted like it was supposed to be. 

Milestone 3: Pre-trip Plan & Research

For our “This Land Is Us” project, we were assigned people groups such as, students, business owners or tourists, which would make our answer to the driving question a little bit more specific and that our final video will turn out different than all of the other students. My people group was Albertans. Each group was given “first dibs” to interview someone at select locations which would also give us a better chance to research on the places and figure out our questions, which is exactly what we did for this assignment. Here is how mine turned out:

I was pretty proud of this assignment because it was pretty well organized so I trusted that it would be a great thing to go back to right before interviewing someone at those locations.

Milestone 4: Daily Note

During our Alberta trip, my class and I each had a document where we we had to answer certain questions based on what we learned and did that day. They also had to be all very well formatted with pictures from that day that were optional.  Here are some examples of a few days:

I was pretty proud of my Daily Note because I found it very eye appealing and organized. Also, for each day, I was always caught up and never had to work on something from the day before. 

Milestone 5: Alberta Video (version 1)

Next, we did our first version of our Alberta video. The day that it was due, in class we presented our videos to a partner and received feedback from them. Later, I also got some feedback from Ms. Maxwell on Showbie. 

Here was my video:

Here was the feedback from one of my classmates:

Here was the feedback from Ms Maxwell:

I struggled a lot with the 4 minute time limit because I wanted to be able to include all of my examples/evidence in the video but ended up just picking the interviews which I thought had the best answers to what I was looking for. The two lenses that I was mostly looking at were social and environmental which the people that I interviewed answered pretty well. The guy at Lake Louise was looking at more of a social lens, the guy at the Minnewanka boat cruise was a little bit of both and the guy from The Lake Louise Gondola And Ranger Program was more focused on an environmental lens. 

I think that my interviews were very good and the points of what I said were very good but I still think that I had a lot to fix in this video and was lucky enough to get some amazing feedback from both my classmate and teacher. I decided to work on:

• Adding music perhaps making my own to the video
• Adding more clips so that the others were shorter
• Evening out my audio to make sure all the clips of me speaking were consistent
• Slowing down some parts to give my viewer time to process information better

Milestone 6: Final Alberta Video

I think that my video improved a lot compared to my first version and I improved on everything that I wanted to improve on. It was also very well organized and was more clear. 

I really enjoyed doing this project and the type of opportunities I got to have during this project such as learning about a lot of different points of views of a lot of different Albertans with completely different lives.