Driving Question:
“How can we use documentary film to guard against authoritarianism?”
Vision:
Consistency and staying curious about learning is the main area I will be focusing on; this goal doesn’t go just to graduation, but beyond it as well. I want to be able to always enjoy the process, have a constant hunger to learn more, and to be able to positively influence the people around me to have the same mindset.
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Authoritarianism: A society where one person or group holds all power with little to no personal freedom for the everyday citizen. A dangerous system that is slowly creeping into our society and destroying our democracies.
Authoritarianism was our main focus for this unit, and how it is our duty to fight against it. I personally have always questioned what truly defined an authoritarian regime, and how one would be able to rise to power.
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During our Launch 🚀, we focused on the key idea on why it is so important to learn about authoritarianism. Like many others, my knowledge was minimal – I had a general idea of what it is and where it has existed.
I always had a mindset of whatever makes a good leader can be in power, whether they were dictators or democratic leaders. I felt like if a leader was effective, they should be able to stay in power. Thinking back, this was a stupid mentality due to not really caring much for the topic and not understanding the dangers of unchecked power. I always thought that Singapore was a great country and knew that they are under a benevolent dictatorship, unaware that this type of government is temporary and usually gets turned into a democracy later on.
What truly made me realize how dangerous dictatorships is the idea of unchecked constant power. If there was an authoritarian leader who has unchecked power wakes up one day on the wrong side of his bed or one of his family members died, he has the ability to just take out his anger on anyone.
I realized, democracy isn’t the greatest system, and in fact, in many ways is pretty terrible and really flawed. However, it is currently our best system and has so far been way better than any other governments that we have had in the past.
https://christianl.craft.me/dictator
This makes us, the people, the only way to fight against dictatorships. We used the On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder book as a way to learn to how to spot authoritarianism and how we can fight against it. I’m not going to go in depth about each lesson as you can learn the key ideas in the documentary below, but will talk about my learning throughout the book.
https://christianl.craft.me/2S2iBebX1FncA2
Like mentioned before, we were divided into many small groups to create segments of a documentary on how we can fight against authoritarianism. It would be a survival guide on fighting tyranny as high school students living in Canada.
video
Connecting my learning back to my VMV strengths, I thought that communication was a consistent factor throughout this project, whether it was to other students discussing about authoritarianism, or to teachers discussing goals over the year. We also had multiple benchmarks like the socratic seminar and documentary that required collaboration and communication with others.
In my VMV goals I talk a lot about how I wanted to extend my learning and make my intentions clear to my teacher, Ms. Madsen. I feel like I was partially successful, I know Ms. Madsen understands my goals and I communicate with her often, but still haven’t reached the exemplary level in my learning. This was shown in the Socratic Seminar where my ideas were on the cusp of going to the next level, but wasn’t able to reach that point. Next project, I hope to be able to achieve what I set out to do.
To add to this, the success behaviour I chose to support this strength is grit. Throughout the whole editing process I was getting kinda annoyed that I was not receiving the full support from my teammates. I still pushed through and got it done in time for Silas to be able to use. I’m going to continue this mindset and not give up on any of my goals.
Overall, I felt like creating a documentary on the dangers of authoritarianism was a great way to guard against authoritarianism. Like mentioned in the movie, education is one of the best ways to fight, staying informed can allow you to spread the word to other people and post online to prevent authoritarianism to ever creep into our society.
Thanks for reading!
-Chris