Reflection On The 1950s

For today’s post I will be reflecting on the experiences from the last project which in which we tried to answer the question “ How has Canadian life developed after WWII?”. I will also be talking about the podcast episode that I created to show what I had learned about continuity and change from the 1950s to now. I had a good time with this project but there are some parts which I found less interesting than others. There is a lot to cover as the 1950s was a time filled with new ideas so I’ll just cover the key parts that I learned in class.

 

During this project I would say the thing I will take away the most from this project is a better idea of what continuity and change is. I would say at the beginning of the project my understanding was so-so, if you asked me to identify constants and changes over a certain amount of time I could probably do that. However in this project I learned how those constants and changes can be explained by other world events and how they can even relate back to myself. Overall I feel as though I have a way better idea of the importance of these ideas.

In the beginning of this project we had to think more locally about what has changed and what hasn’t, and to do this we talked to some long time residents who have lived in Deep Cove for a number of years. This was organized by Deep Cove Heritage Society  who has archives data about the cove from many, many years. Our goal was to find out as much as we could because every little bit of information tells us more about the past, and then we are able to fully reflect on how this area has developed over the years.

In this project the first milestone that I think I learned from was the interview with a Deep Cove resident that I did with Anthony. This not only made us use of interviewing skills, but it used our question creation skills. When I say this I mean being able to make questions up on the spot in order to find as much information as possible, and for me I found this difficult. Usually when I interview I know exactly what I am going to say with a little spare room in case the interviewee has other things to say. That allowed me to really listen to the conversation. Now I had to listen to the conversation and be thinking about all the information my interviewee was talking about in order to ask more questions that would help us understand their story. This was something I never really tried to do to much of with other interviewees so for sure I had a different experience with this one.

During the interview when I was listening to what our resident had to say, I sometimes thought about whether I agree with how big of a change it was. For example they talked about transportation being a big thing back then, but when I looked at transportation now compared to it then I found the only change was the routes, how far they go, and how many different options were available. If they had said that there was no transportation then that’s I huge change. However I listened and there experiences and was able to get a better understand of why this would be a change for her at the time.

Now I had a good idea of change/continuity in the cove, but we are talking about change/continuity in Canada and so I completed a presentation all about continuity and change on a topic of my choice. Of course I chose field hockey. I think at any time if I can connect what I am learning back to field hockey then I get a better understand of what I am learning, so I thought this would be the perfect time to really understand what it is I am learning and how it can connect to other parts of my life.

I had a lot of fun creating this presentation mostly because I am not very familiar with the history of field hockey and it is something I have wanted to know, but I haven’t had the time to find out. I also learned that finding comparisons from past to present was easier than I thought, and I think that is because of the interview I did at the beginning of the project. Hearing my Deep Cove resident talk about all the little changes that she noticed as she grew up made think about what small changes I noticed when I compared my research about the history of field hockey to what I know now. Overall I had fun presenting my sport to my class and showing them what I found about the sport in the past.

The final big part of this project that I really took a lot away from was the podcast. To conclude this project I created another podcast episode ( as you probably saw at the top of this post) and I had a great experience during the interview and when I was putting the podcast together. By interviewee’s name is John Wallace and he was an Olympic rower who won gold for Canada in 1992. We had a great discussion about what his experiences were like preparing and competing at the olympics, and what he thinks about the next generation of athletes.

For me it was awesome to hear this thoughts on what he looks forward to see in the next generation of rowers. After I did a little research I found out that rowing Canada actually sent rowers to compete for spots in the qualifier for Tokyo in may, which was right around the time when I did the interview. I thought it was also cool because I know there are people who I play with right now who could say the same things that John did about the next generation of field hockey players, and for some reason I thought that was really cool. 

When I was putting the whole podcast together I had a few moments when I would have to re-listen to audio from the interview over and over because there was so much I wanted to put into the podcast. I felt that John’s story of how he got to the olympics was really great, but his thoughts on how the sport has/ hasn’t stayed the same was something I really wanted on the podcast as well. I went over clips again and again and the editing process took me a long time because of this. 

The problem I was having is that John’s answers about continuity/ change were exactly what I needed to make this podcast exactly what my teachers wanted. However I thought it was really important to put in the beginning parts about how he become a rower because then you realize that what he thinks about changes and about future rowers is really important and how his view is not something you get to hear everyday. In the end I think I got the right amount of both parts and the podcast turned out pretty good.

In conclusion during this project I think I was successfully able to understand our topic and why we were learning about, and I was able to connect it back to my own experiences outside of school to demonstrate my understanding. Also I had fun with this project, I learned a lot about what the past was like which I thought was cool, and I got to make a really fun podcast episode as well. 

That’s all for now.

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