Our Second Official Language – French.

Hello all, Welcome to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about a project called “A Case for a Nation”. This project was about Nationalism and the ripple affect that comes along with it. We did most of our whole class learning on Nationalism in Canada, but some people later picked different cases of nationalism to research.

Driving Question

“How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?”

I think that the best answer to this question would be the caption that my group came up with for our instagram post (this will make more sense later on in the post).

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.”

In the last few sentences of that paragraph, it links the two timelines together by showing the connection of French Canadian nationalism to present day, which is exactly what the driving question is asking.

Current Events

After briefly looking into the concept of nationalism, we worked on an assignment to understand nationalism in todays world, thus revealing the “Current Events Presentation”. For this, we researched a relatively current event that was happening around the world that could relate to Identity and Nationalism. We than made a document with some images, sources and facts. We than presented our documents to a small group of people through the first portion of the project. I did my presentation on the boil water advisory crisis affecting First Nations communities across the country. This little exercise helped me practice my research skills/presentation creating and was a start into identifying nationalism.

Building Knowledge

Before we split into our final groups for the project, we needed to form bit of a backstory as to where we are in history. We learned about the formation of Upper and Lower Canada, the Canadian Confederation, and cases of nationalism across the world. We did a few different knowledge-building activities to dive into each of those three topics. First, we started to learn about nationalism as a concept across the globe. We read printed out pages from a textbook that discussed different places and their struggles with nationalism, and conferred with our groups to take notes and discuss. Then, we learned about Upper and Lower Canada. We did a pseudo-simulation called the “Rebellion Scene Investigation”, taking us back to the two colonies to explore their differences and learn about the people who lived in the majority French vs majority English parts of Canada. This part of the project helped us practise taking historical perspective of life back then to learn why they may have acted certain ways or made certain decisions.

The Product

Finally, we split into groups of 3 based on which topic we chose, but I accidentally picked a group who already had three people so we became the only group of 4. There were many topics to chose from and the topic we chose was “Quebecois / French Nationalism in Canada”. I chose this topic because I felt like I had enough prior knowledge to do a good job at executing the work that would coincide with it. Plus I think that it is important to learn about the French existence in Canada because it is a big part of how our country was formed. 

The finial product of this project was an Instagram post. We had to create 3 images with our group that would be the images displayed in the post. So to start off with, we individually had to create 3 images. One had to be a image digitally drawn on, another had to be a quote, and the last one was a choice. My first three images were as follows ; 

The people in my group also created 3 images, Declan, Faith, and Zach. We picked in class one image from everyone to make a compilation that we think best showed French Nationalism in Canada.

Next, we worked on the caption. We looked at our topic and thought about the story behind it. We used different strategies like the “story spine” and started to condense the years of change and nationalism into just the most important points.  Again we first created a caption individually and then later would combine ours with our group. Here was mine; 

“French Canadian nationalism has been prominent in Canada since upper and lower Canada were formed way back in 1791. From Politics and economics to social ramifications, French Canadians have a history of being oppressed by British rule in the formation of the country that we now call Canada. Citizens had to fight long and hard for French representation in their government systems even in areas where it was a 95% majority of French Canadians. Modern day Quebec even has political parties that are calling for Quebec to separate from Canada and become its own independent nation.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory” 

We then sat down as a group and looked at all of our captions in a shared pages document. We highlighted what we liked and wanted to keep on each others captions and then glued them together to create one final masterpiece. Here is my groups final caption;

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory #francophone 

@that_snail_kid @declan.rattray @zachv24 and Faith”

Conclusion

Overall, I think this project was rather enjoyable. I learned much more depth into the formation of Canada, and the impact that French Canadian history has on Canada today. I also gained a lot of skills on how to write your opinion and support it with all the stuff it needs to make your writing effective.

Here you can check out the instagram account that the whole classes posts will be up on soon. Hopefully you will go quickly check those out and drop a few likes :D.

Historical perspectives instagram account!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?

Summative reflection time!

Finally, the end! Hopefully you have read my earlier post on my reflection so far. If you haven’t read that, I would suggest you go read it before you finish this. My previous reflection was based on the technical aspect of the process of creating the individual advertisement drafts.

But wait, what about the DRIVING QUESTION?! Ah yes, the driving question. “How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?” Where to start, where to start? Advertisers use a variety of techniques to engage their target audience in buying something, doing something, going somewhere, supporting something or someone, etc. All ads we see are created to catch the attention of a specific group of people. Sometimes media uses something that you can relate to to influence you. You can also be subconsciously influenced if you don’t recognize the appeals that you are connecting to. In my opinion, I think that in this case, ignorance is not bliss and that it is better to be aware of how you are being influenced. That I guess is the answer to the driving question.

All of the project was basically ramping up to milestone 6, the final advertisement!

“Wow!” “Oh my goodness really?” “That’s so cool.” “Yayyyyyy!”

But seriously, north groups were scrambling to get the best collaborative advertisement finished and sent to the business ASAP. We had to take all of our feedback that we have received and refine it all down to one amazing advertisement that is ready to be seen by the public eye. Are you ready to see my north groups ad? Drumroll please! *Cue dramatic drumroll*

TA DAAAAAAA!

Lets now talk about the competencies that we used to help us complete the project. We used competencies from English, social studies, and maker. The english competencies we used were ‘Comprehending texts’ and ‘Designing texts’. The ‘Comprehending texts’ competency was very helpful to me because I learned a variety of different strategies to help me understand and analyze different types of texts. I think I greatly improved my text comprehension skills throughout this project. 

I really saw my growth in this project when we made the individual advertisement drafts. (Yet again please go read that post.) My first draft was pretty bad and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing but by the time that we were finishing our final ads I actually was using knowledge that I gained over the project. I was learning new skills and I could visually see the progress I was making. Let me tell you, it is really cool to be able to look back on your work and see how much your skills have changed.

My favourite part of this whole project would probably be any work I did with my north group. We had such good times and shared many laughs XD. A big thanks to Gabi, Dylan, Sabrina, Erik, and Judah

I learned a lot about advertising in this project and how media is used to influence me. I know that I have gained knowledge that I will carry with me for a long time.

Thank you for reading my post and I hope you enjoyed!

As always, Brooke.

The medium is the message- My Reflection so far.

Wow I can’t believe that it is already almost the end of this quarter. Time has flown by since the beginning of this new project we started. In PLP we always start the project with a driving question. Our driving question was “How does what we hear, read, and see, influence us?”. My first reaction to hearing that was “Oh it’s probably going to be something about media and advertising.” And I was right. 

As per usual, we kicked off the project with the Launch. We were told that throughout this project, we would have 4 separate teams to work on things with. The teams were North – our main project group, East – design/photo group, South – analysis group, and we had our West group – advertising. One of the first things we do in a project is develop our ‘need to knows’. For this, we were in our north groups because these are the people we will be spending the most time with on the actual project. We had a whiteboard-sheet-thingy and our group had to sort the NTKs into three categories: 

Product – What will we make to share our learning?  

Process – How are we learning? How are we gaining new knowledge? and

Content – What are we learning? 

We would be coming back time and time again to this sheet to add more questions and park the questions that we already answered.

Each north group got to choose a local business establishment to create an advertisement for. My north group chose to do The Raven Pub & Liquor store. We contacted them via email with some questions about their business to help us when we create the advertisements. We got a reply back with answers so we were ready to start preparing for our drafts. We learned about what makes a persuasive ad, layout and composition, advertising techniques and appeals, images and copy. The first drafts were made that night and then we went back to school the next day and continued to learn more about how to make a professional ad. We would get time to share our drafts with our north group to receive feedback and critique to then go make another draft. At this point I have now made 4 advertisement drafts.

 

Draft 1 ⬆️ – This was my first advertisement draft. I did NOT like how it turned out. I didn’t like how the ravens feet were lost in the title, I didn’t like the layout, the text was all mismatched, it just wasn’t working for me.

Draft 2 ⬆️ – I tried to change it up a bit from the first draft by adding a actual photo from the raven. I also changed the copy.

Draft 3 ⬆️ – After lots of peer feedback I rearranged the text boxes and yet again Changed the copy text.

Draft 4 ⬆️ – I wanted to try to do something completely different with this draft and I think it paid off. I chose a completely different layout and background. This is by far my favourite draft because I love the minimalistic tone to it while still representing the rustic raven. I wish I had made more of the text match though. (Definitely will do that for my next revision.)

  • Draft 1. My individual ad for the Raven pub.

It has been especially cool to relate this projects learnings to my everyday life. I can now look at ads and try to gain further knowledge of how they are influencing me and what techniques they are using. I can think questions like: Does this ad use pathos, ethos, or logos? What is the message this ad is trying to send? Who is the target audience? Am I the target audience? 

Anyways thank you for reading my post and I hope you enjoyed!

As always, Brooke.