Humanities

How Should We Govern Ourself?

October 29, 2021

This project was called, Think you can do better? The end goal of the project was creating a video for our political party. Our political party was made up of 5 students in our class, we had to work together to build a political party with a set of values, come up with promises, and polices. My group consisted of, Dries, Randy, Ryan, and Ethan. As a group, before we could create our video, we had to learn about the Canadian government and what our personal political ideologies are. To do this we had two milestones, for each milestone we wrote a blog post. The first one was a reflection on the election that just occurred and to show our understanding of the structure of the government. The second one was a statement of intent for our political party.

The driving question for this project was, how should we govern ourselves? Trying to answer this question, the political party I was in created this video as our attempt, 

The video also talks about our party, who we are and what we stand for.

Trying to govern ourselves can take a lot of work, creating even just a small political party can be a lot of work. You have to find a group of like-minded people to work towards a common goal together. One thing I think is a really important part of governing ourselves is communication and how we work as a team. These past elections we’ve ended up with a minority government, where different parties have to work together to pass bills and make other important decisions. Even within a single party there are going to be different opinions on the decisions you have to make.

While working with my group and trying to create my political party, communication and working as a team was something we really had to work on. My party was made up of people who had some different political views. This made it harder right away, because we didn’t come together to work for a common goal, we were put together and had to find a common goal. However, as we went along, we got better and better at putting together our party and agreeing on what we stood for as group. 

A big thing that helped me was focusing on the little things. For us this meant taking even the smallest things we agreed on and building ideas off of that. This may seem like a small thing, but it can actually be a lot harder than it sounds. Only in actually reflecting on this project and the process we went through did I realize how much my group did this. It was through my zettelkasten I was able to connect a piece of art that I made to the idea of building off the little things.

Zettelkasten is a note taking system, where you write down all your thoughts and ideas as they come in order to not forget them. Then you tag each note, notes can have the same tags as long as they relate to what your note is about. Notes with the same tags are then connected, you can look back at your notes and find ideas and connections that you wouldn't have seen without writing them down and tagging them. To do this I use an app called, Craft. There are many other ways to do this though.

This art came from thoughts of when I was a child. I had just watched a video of myself as a small child putting on a “show” for my parents. They were telling me how I always said, “mom watch this”, or “dad watch that”, and how they would always have to act like they liked what I did, even if they felt I could do way better things. I started thinking about this and how when I was that age it didn’t matter if they really enjoyed it, as long as they smiled I was happy. This lead to the quote, “let the little things hold you up”. Even if its that small smile, as a kid it made me keep going and keep putting on performances.

 

I found as our group worked together I got better at being the person in the middle, who listened to all the ideas and tried to find the common ground. I tried taking topics that we all had similar opinions on, and actually get my group to discuss them. To do this I would ask group members to share their opinion instead of us all talking over each other. This was something that was quite common as we were a louder group. However with all my experience in group projects now, I find I work better in louder more talkative groups, where everyone is sharing ideas. Over my PLP years I think I have built up the skill of helping people work together and combine ideas. I found in this project I really noticed it, as politics is something where people tend to have more personal opinions on topics, and I was able to help my group communicate and work together. This skill also allows me to process and learn about what other people know and think, and I find I actually learn a lot more this way because I’m not just learning what I take in but also what other are learning and taking in from the project.

Something I struggled with this project was being able to support my opinion with evidence and research. I think part of it was I didn’t put the time into looking for credible sources to add, and I didn’t quite understand having the need to add evidence for all my opinions and what I was talking about. Of course, now this makes so much sense, you have to be able to show people that your opinion comes from an educated place. You’re also giving them a place to learn more about what your talking about, and showing that what your claiming has actual evidence not something you guessed or made up.

During this project I think I built on skills and failed at learning some skills. I think the skills I feel I didn’t do well at learning during the project (using supporting evidence), I actually came to realize the importance of the skill and how I can use it better after the project was over. This is something that I’ve always been told about, you can always learn more from reflecting. I’ve felt this is true for a while now as I’ve experienced it when writing other blogs, but this project really brought it back and showed me how powerful it can be. 

As for learning how we should govern ourself, I think it takes thought and consideration. We need to be able to understand and communicate with each other. I think the communication should involve citizens of all kind and their input. This is just one of the main things I feel I learned from this project, it was something that came in useful for my party and I think it is an important part of governing ourselves. 

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