Over the past few weeks my class began to learn more about what exactly Canadian identity means, since we had done projects in the past about Canadian identity it was easy to relate out ideas to our past work. We began learning more about Canadian history, we each read and took notes about multiple articles about certain parts of Canadian history of government, this was to further improve our understanding of what we needed to learn. We then made a Zettlekasten which if you probably don’t know it’s a type of note taking form that helped us collectively write down our ideas. The end I goal for this project was a Human Library and the idea was to invite around 20 people who have had a different life experience to come and tell their story at this event, sadly from lack of preparation we were only able to find around 8 people to come and since most of the event revolved around showcasing their voices we had to cancel the Human Library due to lack of books. Though this was disappointing we still had to complete a speech about what we thought represented Canadian identity, the idea for the speeches was that we can proudly present our ideas as well as use our public speaking skills. Since I had never made a speech before this was really challenging for me, I didn’t know how to start or how to keep the audiences attention, while I was practicing my speech I began to see the rhythm I needed to follow but the day of presentation I messed up my pace in the middle of it which threw me off by a bit but I got back on track afterwards.
Here’s a link to my speech:
After the speeches were done the exhibition planning began and we had to start up fast since we had a little over a week to get ready, we were then told about the theme which was Canada a Live Story, and our grade was one of the more important parts of the exhibition set up, our grade had “Scenes of us” which was confusing at first because we were told to create a moment that represented the event that we chose but also be like a Disney character but with some back and forth we ended up with a short interactive scene which our group presented on the day, our scene went like this: Tommy Douglas (me) presents his new bill for universal healthcare and explains how it can benefit the nation for the future but needs a member of the audience to come sign it, after the bill is signed the other members of my group acted out a real life example of how universal healthcare can benefit Canadians by making a small scene of somebody hurting themselves and not being able to pay their bill but with the help of Tommy Douglas’s new bill they can afford it now. Most of the planning came to us early and it was a work in progress as we got feedback from teachers, as we created props we got more and more ideas to fully immerse the guests by adding more details in my speech like giving the date before I talk so people can understand what era our scene is from, I had practiced my speech a good amount so I felt ready to present, I ended up doing the speech maybe only 10 times but with bigger audiences, the more and more I did the speech the easier it got and near the end of the exhibition I began to have a little fun with it by adding some jokes but the biggest showstopper of the night was the mobflash which was one of the biggest curveballs that were thrown in this project, essentially we had a choreographed dance that occurred every 20 minutes telling the story of Canada through dance. Seeing how much could have gone wrong I was very surprised by the day of presentation since the dance went really well and was a big hit with the guests. Being able to learn about these historic events and then get to act them out was one of the most fun exhibitions that I’ve done or maybe I just liked wearing a suit all day who knows? Overall I think that I took away a lot from this project and enjoyed it much more than others but I hope PLP doesn’t decide that the dance should return, thanks for reading.