“Colonizing in a Tempest” is our final Humanities project for this grade 8 year and we decided to end the year with a bang. The driving question for this project was “How can we use Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the history of New France to stage a dramatic tableau that helps an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?” I was very sceptical but I was open to the new project and I wanted to learn a lot. Before we could start creating the tableau, we first needed to learn about the topic and dive deep into the history and information. In this project we had to combine the Tempest and New France while still being culturally ethical. 

The first activity we did was on anthropology where we had to act like a new society and the anthropologist had to recognize the differences in the cultures. After this, we learnt about being ethical while talking about different cultures. We talked about generalization and judgment, where we learnt about the extremes on each topic. I learnt how to be ethical while not stereotyping, being ethnocentric or culture superior. This was very valuable when learning about the Tempest and New France because I could keep this activity in mind while learning about the rest of the project.

Learning about the history of New France was really fun and interesting. We reviewed the first contact to the treaty of Paris through activities, passages, skits and writing our own paragraphs. I thought I learnt a lot during this project because I reviewed the topics every night to be active in conversations. Our first topic was about why the First Nations traded with the Newcomers. We learnt about early trade, fur trading competition, expanding the fur trade and the HBC. With the information that we learnt, we had to write a paragraph with a hook, topic sentence, 3 supporting details and a conclusion on the driving question.

After this,  we learnt about the life in a colony by looking into early colonists, citizens of New France and Population/Immigration. Learning about the struggles and hardships that went into living in the early colonies was really interesting. To prove our understanding, we did a skit with our group about the life in a colony. We then wrote about the skit and what we learnt about the driving question. Our final building knowledge topic was about how interactions between First Nations and Europeans continued and changed. This topic described treaties and agreements, growth in colonies and what happened as colonists kept taking land and goods. As the French colonies grew, they were taking more land from the First Nations. This acquisition caused conflict resulting in treaties having to be signed for trade, land, peace and friendship, rights, or a combination of these. Many wars were to come between the European colonies for example: the Beaver Wars and the Seven Years’ War.

To understand the Tempest, we first needed to understand the play’s background. Shakespeare’s history was the first thing we learnt about by reading about his life, his plays and his language. Once we discussed Shakespeare, we then needed to learn about the Tempest. We were introduced to the play, shown fun facts and were told about the backstory. I really enjoyed learning about Shakespeare and all the interesting facts. Before actually watching the play, we did pre readings on the background and vocabulary of the acts within the play. Watching the Tempest was exciting and showed us the characters and plot line that we needed to incorporate into the tableau. While watching the Tempest we needed to do an active reading on the acts to learn what was going on.

Within our groups, we first made character lines, then acted it out and recorded it using Clips. However, without background information given to the audience before the tableau, it wouldn’t make sense. We therefore wrote long narrations about what happens in the Tempest, the history of New France referencing to the play and the characters in the tableau. Afterwards, we  created a background scene to accompany our tableau while presenting. We created animations of the sun moving, flag waving, birds flying, leaves blowing and people walking.

I felt my group worked well together making a narration script and lines for the characters. I was really happy that I completed the active readings in class while still producing quality work. I thought I understood what we were really learning because I went over the information a lot in order to have an easier time with creating the tableau. I was very happy with how the tableau turned out and when presenting I believed I pronounced my lines very clearly and loud. This part of the project was a class effort and everyone helped in making this possible. We brought in costumes and had many rehearsals in order to make our presentation the best possible.

Throughout this project we learnt about the Tempest, ethical judgement and New France. I thought my writing skills really improved over the course of the project but I think I can still improve on the speed that it takes me to express myself and get my thoughts organized. I participated in discussion and I shared my opinions and understanding openly. I had lots of fun during this project and I thought learning about Shakespeare’s the Tempest and New France was really interesting. The tableau turned out really well and I believe it reflected all of the work the class put into it. This was our last project for Humanities and it was a good way to end our eventful year.