Revolutions on Trial

    Hello there and welcome back to my blog.  In this post I’m going to be telling you about the latest project that we did in PLP.  It’s called Revolutions on Trial and in this project we learned about how and why revolutions happen as well as what makes for a successful revolution.

    As you may or may not know, for every project we start with a driving question.  The driving question for this project was ‘How Might we as Legal Teams Determine the Effectiveness and Ineffectiveness of a Revolution?’.  The ‘final goal’ for this project was to take everything that we learned and use it in a mock trial where each revolution was put on trial to see if it was effective or ineffective.  I should also mention that not everybody studied the same revolution throughout this project.  There were things that we did as an entire class and individually, but we were in groups for the majority of the project.  There were four groups that we were split up into.  Each group was assigned a different revolution to study.  Those four revolutions were the French, American, Haitian, and Xinhai.  I was part of the American revolution group.  Later in the project, each revolution group was split up and given either the title of prosecution or defence.  If you were defence than you were arguing that the revolution was effective and if you were prosecution than you were arguing that it was an ineffective revolution.

    Now to tell you about what we actually did during this project.  At the start of the project, we were assigned the book Animal Farm, which we were to read over the span of the next couple of weeks.  Animal Farm is a book by George Orwell, first published in England in 1945. The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy.  It also happens to be an analogy for the Russian Revolution.  We did weekly discussions about what had happened in the book.  After we were done the book, we wrote a paragraph or two that explained the anatomy of the revolution in Animal Farm through use of Crane Briton’s Theory.  If you dont know, Crane Briton’s Theory explains how revolutions happen and escalate through the four stages; incubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery.

This does have spoilers for the book so read at your own risk.

    Another thing that we did during this project was the Nation X simulation.  Nation X was our made up society where we had to work together to create a fair and functional society where everybody’s needs were met.  After we completed the simulation, we wrote a reflection on whether or not we were able to create and maintain a fair and functional society.  We also had to include what we thought was crucial to ensure this.  Here is my Nation X reflection.

    The final big thing that we did in this project was create a graphic organizer on the revolution that we were assigned.  We had to do a bunch of research on our revolution.  One thing I noticed while doing this was that it can be quite hard to find proper dates for stuff in history.  These are the points that we had to include in our graphic organizer.

  • Revolution Name & Date 
  • Underlying Conditions (Incubation Stage) 
  • Key Triggers (What was the tipping point of this revolution? Crisis Stage)
  • Key Characters (Name at least two individuals of note) 
  • Effectiveness of the Revolution 
  • Ineffectiveness of the Revolution 
  • Continuity and Change (How did this revolution change this society? What stayed the same?) 

    And now to elaborate on the ‘final goal’ for this project.  As you know, we had to do a mock trial for our revolution.  This required even more research than the graphic organizer.  Our whole group was tearing apart the internet trying to find documents from eye witnesses of crucial events in our revolution.  From all the documents and letters that we found, we had to take parts of them and use them in our affidavit and script for the mock trial.  Unfortunately I was sick for the week of the exhibition, (an annual ’fair’ where all the grades of PLP display their latest project for people to see), and I did not participate in the mock trial.  Luckily, all four of the mock trials were filmed and put on YouTube.  Here is the mock trial for the American Revolution.  Thank you for reading my post on our latest project, Revolutions on Trial, and I hope you return to my blog soon.

Here is the mock trial for the American Revolution. ⬇️

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *