colonizing in a tempest reflection
Well, the the colonizing in a tempest project is over, so it’s reflection time! For a brief overview of what happened, we had to answer the driving question “how can we use Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?”. We did research on New France and how to stage tableaus, and the end result was a tableau based on the Tempest that talked about the history of New France. However, apart from the final result, there a few things we did that were really important in answering the driving question, which is what I am going to be talking about here.
The first one we did was an activity on how to be a good anthropologist, and to really assess the documents written by Europeans in New France to see if they were writing it in a sense that they were culturally superior or giving too much ground to the First Nations and excusing everything they did because they didn’t want to be biased on judging them. I feel this really helped us see both sides of what happened in new France, and be fair to the French, British, and First Nations alike in our presentation. This was very important to the driving question because if we didn’t learn about this, we would be probably have been biased in the timeline we did, which I talk about later, and we would probably be biased in choosing what things to include in the tableau. The activities we did is here, we basically had to assess if the author was biased or not.
The next thing we did that I thought was important to answering the driving question was when we had to summarize each of the acts of the tempest into something that we could actually perform as a tableau. Being able to identify the important parts and moods of the scene and summarizing them was vital to the completion of the final product and answering the driving question. If we didn’t do this we probably would have ended up doing things that weren’t as important as we thought, which wouldn’t leave room for more important events. This was an important thing to learn in general as well, because you will probably end up summarizing things for other projects, like we did for our blue sky keynote.
Example of what the timeline looked like.
The third thing that was pretty important was the timeline. The timeline was important because we had to put the most important events in New France, and then put if they were positive or negative and add up to see if the exploration in New France was positive or negative overall. It was very important to the driving question because it decided which events we put into the tableau, which was a vital to explaining the history of New France while being brief as possible. Summarizing was also very import skill here, as we couldn’t include too many things, and learning to summarize things is a very valuable skill. Anyways, that was my blog post on the colonizing in a tempest blog post, you can see the part of the tableau that I was in here.