We just finished another project, and now it’s reflection time! This project was called “Let’s Get Riel!”, with the driving question of “How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?”. In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t spell real wrong, because Riel is the last name of Louis Riel, who was a big focus of the project. You probably don’t know who he is, and we didn’t either, so we read this comic book about him throughout the project, creatively titled “Louis Riel”.

We’ll talk about Mr. Riel more later, because our first milestone actually had nothing to do with Louis Riel. Our first milestone was a current event that had to have happened fairly recently. After some research, I decided to do a particular incident which was part of the recent Wet’suwet’en protests, which I found quite interesting. Current events are always fun to do, and I think this milestone is a good example of my Connect competency, because I got to read about other people’s thoughts on the issue while researching it, and eventually got to form and write about my own opinion.In the next milestone we got to find out what the end goal of our project would be. We were put into partners, I was with Holly, and we had to choose our own event to analyze and decide if it was ethical or not. We also had to create our own driving question, and some images that represented our event, which would then be posted on a class instagram page. Holly and I started out by choosing an event to analyze. We ended up choosing the Douglas Treaties, which we had to research, and then put all the information we found on a worksheet. We found out that the Douglas Treaties were a bunch of treaties signed with First Nations tribes on Vancouver Island, except they were pretty dubious, and nobody knows if they were legit or not. This made a pretty interesting topic, as the whole project was about ethical dimensions, and I think that this was another good example of my Connect competency, because me and Holly alike had to discuss our perspectives of what we had researched.

For the next milestone, we started to work on the prototypes for our Instagram images. I had come up with the idea for a kind of internet “phishing scam”, which is kind of what happened with the First Nations during that event, because they got scammed. I also realized that phishing sounds like fishing after Holly informed me, and the First Nations were promised fishing rights that they never received, which I thought was quite clever.After receiving feedback on our prototypes, Holly and I finished our final drafts for milestone 4, which we ended up sharing to the class. We had created a total of three images, as well as an Instagram caption to go along with them.I think this milestone is a great example of the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency, because we formed and shared our own opinions through the images we created. We supported them with evidence we gathered from our research, and in turn we showed our understanding of ethical dimensions.

Hey, remember Louis Riel, that guy I was talking about at the beginning of the post? Well, we had been reading the book throughout all the other milestones, and found out that he was a Métis leader who opposed the Canadian government and ended up being executed, but we got to form our own opinions on the ethical dimensions of the events in the book in the final milestone, which was a literary response. I really enjoyed this milestone, because I had developed some of my own opinions while reading the book, and now I got to write about them. I also think this is another excellent example of the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency, because I got to read about a historical event, form my own opinions and support them with research, and show my understanding of ethical dimensions.This project was a short one, but I actually really enjoyed most of it. I found the book quite interesting, and it was fun to write about my own opinions, as well as creating the images. I hope that we get the opportunity to do something like it in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for more!