hello ladies and gentlemen of my PLP blog. Unfortunately This will be my last post…

Until after spring break!

Today I will review and reflect on our most recent Humanities project: Case for a Nation

The basis for the project was centred around nationality. For those of you that were like me a month ago, nationalism, is the belief of superiority and identification that ones nation is superior to other nations, making their values and interests lesser than their own. 

To apply this knowledge to a project, we would create an instagram post, containing 3 images and a caption. Now, because we live in Canada, this post would be about Canadian history, but some people decided to do examples of nationality in other places too.

Going into this project, I had no idea what nationality was. I thought it was like racism for a country’s stereotypes. Well, I was kind of right and kind of wrong. Our “introduction event” if you may, was us creating a TikTok. Now that I think about it, this project has had a heavy influence from social media. Anyways, we had to create a short clip containing Canadian Stereotypes. It looked a little something like this:

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And thats where our project began. In our last project, revolutions on trial, we used keystones instead of milestones. In this project there were 3 keystones and within those keystones, there were assignments. Projects before used milestones, which were a lot of important assignments and multiple smaller assignments called stepping stones.

The 3 keystones in this project were Historical Perspectives in Canada, Understanding Nationalism and Communicate Compellingly.

Historical Perspectives in Canada was about Canada forming as a nation. This contained activity’s like the Mock Conferences in which we were put into groups to represent different parts of Canada. We would then meet with the other groups and negotiate terms to join the confederation. The goal of this keystone was to give us some background info on the formation of Canada and the different perspectives that groups had on the situation. All of this would be helpful in the understanding and creation of our final product.

Understanding nationalism was pretty self explanatory by the name. We learned about nationalism, what it was, the dangers, the benefits, and forms. An important assignment in this keystone was the nationalism jigsaw. We would go around from table to table that contained info on different forms of Nationalism and we had to answer the same questions for each situation from different places. It was interesting to see different forms and how they change from place to place. The goal of this keystone was to give us a greater understanding of what nationalism really was. 

Communicate Compellingly is the more social aspect of the project. This keystone contained our current events assignment. For this we had to create a 5 minute presentation about how a ongoing current event anywhere in the world. Analyze that event, and present on how it connects to identity and nationalism. In this keystone we started developing our instagram post, including the caption and the three images. This keystone was to give us a better understanding of our topic and to create our final product.

So at the start of this amazing post, I vaguely talked about what our final product would be. 

At the start of this project, we chose a topic to make our images and caption about. We were given a pre-determined list of topics to choose from (but you could use choose one that you came up with). I choose the Red River Resistance for mine. There were a lot of topics on the list that I already knew and it would be pretty easy to choose one of these too, but I decided to go with something that I didn’t know (and sounded cool). I actually really enjoyed learning about this topic, but I wont get into this too much (heres my opinion piece if you want to read more about it.)

Me and my partner created a caption about the event and how it connects to worldview, and 3 images that relate to the event. 

One was a drawn on image:

One was a image containing a quote:

And one was a collage:

I think everything turned out great and if you want to see more heres a link to the instagram page:

All and all I felt like I learnt a lot in this project. from the research about the foundation of Canada, the different perspectives of people during that time. Researching about my current event and researching about my topic. I also learned about nationalism in its entirety! Plus the creation of the images, and different writing assignments like the opinion piece, caption and more really helped me improve on my writing skills. I enjoyed learning about all this and moving foreword, there is room for improvement, but I’m not disappointed at all!