For the first unit of PLP 9 humanities and the main focus of our field study to Alberta was place, and how it impacts us as people and other groups such as tourists. The driving question was ‘how does place impact who we are?’.
After we were introduced to the planner for the projects and each milestone we will have to accomplish we went straight into an activity about what things impact us living in North Vancouver. We were told to create a creative response to showcase our ideas so I decided to make a photoshop collage of a bunch of things that are important to me living here. I think this was a good way to start off our project cause it gave a good idea of what we were aiming to figure out for the larger part of the project and got us thinking and out of summer mode.
One of our next activities was we were put into groups of four and given a news article for each lens. The lens I ended up with was political. The news article my group was given was about the appeal from BC to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline. Here is what I wrote.
The next thing we did was in random order have everyone pick a group of people from a list to make the groups for the project. The group of people I chose was tourists and In my group also focusing on tourists was Kaden, Ben and Gabe.
Our next major milestone in the project was planning out our project. We were assigned places where we would focus on and hopefully interview people at. Our job was to research there places. We also had another couple tasks in planning our project and those were, to create a timeline of major events that impacted our group over time. Our other task was to just get more specific into who we were interviewing and the questions we should be asking them. I think this was really smart to do instead of going into Alberta not knowing what to do. I think it also made us more comfortable about what we were doing there now that we had a nice plan.
The last thing I am going to mention from before the trip was a little activity that just taught us about the bison and their near extinction. This just taught us a bit more about the history of game in the prairies and how the natives relied upon the bison for nearly everything.
The next thing we knew we were off to Alberta. For the first bit of the trip I got no interviews and was still figuring out what was going on but, by the second day I was able to get two interviews from a park ranger and a Rogers Pass expert from the discovery center and then later another one in Lake Louise. Other than a few other single question interviews that weren’t recorded I was able to get one more at our boat cruise at Lake Minnewanka. I will probably talk more about the trip on a later blog post.
Once we got back from the trip our first task was to come up with a script. Then, we had to begin making our video. Our video had to be between three and four minutes and it turned out my first script and plan was five minutes so after revising my script and fixing my video I was able to make my first draft of the video. Here is the feedback I got on it.
Once I looked over the feedback I changed and completed everything suggested except I was unable to speak slower. I created my own music in garage band also for my final video where I give my answer to the driving question. Here it is.
I think that this project has been pretty good from a learning standpoint. I think it was good that we got to learn about this subject cause it shows you the perspective of so many groups on the land and you get to learn so much about your actual main group of people that you wouldn’t be able to without going on the trip and having the first hand experience of being a tourist there and talking to the experts on your group. I do think it would be better if the groups were less specific as it could let you learn more about all the groups but with this method you can go look at classmates blog posts and look at what they learned and get the full understanding.