Morals of the Past

Hey guys, for the last little bit our class has been learning about Canadian history such as how we came to Confederation in our last project. And it seems we have continued that trend with our new project which is based around Ethical Dimensions in Canadian history. For this project we were asked to answer the driving question:

How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?

And as you probably guessed, to do that we would have to create images that surrounded a certain topic that is still debated about to this day. Finally, we would use the two competencies Connect and Understand Ethical Dimensions to help us with the understanding and creation of these pictures.

Since we were focusing on events that happened over a hundred years ago for our final pictures and main research we were given the task of finding out about social injustices in the last thirty years and write a short summary on it. I think having this activity as one of the first things we did for this project really helped me with the Connect competency later in the project. The reason I think this is that when you learn about events that happened a long time ago it’s easy to not have as much empathy and put much thought into it because “it happened so long ago.” However, by looking at these somewhat similar events that have happened way closer to our life time, it helped me really understand why people may feel the same way towards these other events.

After we had finished our launch activity and had a better understanding of using the Connect Competency it was time to move onto the main event: the pictures. For the actual main part of the project we were partnered up with someone else to eraser her and create pictures about our topic. My partner was Ben, and we had decided that we wanted to do our project about The Battle of Seven Oaks. Of course, before we could start to plan out and make our pictures we had to actually know what this event actually was. This is where the Connect competency came in, while learning about our topic I found that I was really struggling to figure out what the historical injustice was. That was until I started to use the connect competency and understand how the people at this time were affected by this battle and how the people involved had affected things beforehand that would have lead to this battle.

 

Finally it was time to actually create our images. The main point of these images were to get people to question wether the actions in our event was just or unjust, and what better way to help me convey that then to use the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency. I found that when creating my images I had a hard time showing both sides of the story because when researching I had already basically made my decision on the Ethical Dimensions of the Battle. This was a big problem because these images were supposed to get people to create their own opinion on the subject. I ended re-reading the different places I got our research from and came up with a lot of different opinions on the subjects that I could convey in the photos. I think this was a good example of me using the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency because I used it to create a lot of different opinions on the Battle by looking at the different things that lead to the Battle and what happened during and after it as well.

In the end, I think I’ve gotten a new appreciation for what First Nations have had to go through throughout our history. I’ve learned a lot about how there can be many different opinions and views on past events and it’s up to us to figure out if actions were fair or unjust. But the main thing I’ve learned is how to put deeper meanings in the images that you create and how to tell a story through images.