Hello and welcome back to my blog! Today’s post is about our latest humanities project, Revolutions on Trial. For the past few weeks in class, we’ve been learning all about the anatomy of revolutions and what makes a fair and functional society. The main focus was the American, French, Haitian, and Xinhai revolutions. Our mission was to determine whether the revolution was successful using legal proceedings. We were all sorted into revolution groups and told whether we were on defence or prosecution. I was on defence for the American revolution, meaning I was saying that the American revolution was effective. This humanities project was a bit different. Instead of milestones, we had keystone understandings. There were three categories that we learned about in this project. The first was Why do Revolutions Happen? The second was What events happened in the revolution I am studying? The final one was How do legal team prepare for a trial. In this post I’ll be explaining my learning for each keystone, a bit about the core competencies used in this project, and my answer to the driving question. To kick off this project, we did something called Nation X, which was pretty complicated, but it involved the class trying to roleplay and fix a corrupt system, similar to France prior to the French Revolution. We had to try and fix the separation of the classes and become a fair and functional society. When I say that it went completely off the rails, that doesn’t even begin to describe the chaos that ensued. Things were going well in the simulation. We had just appointed a new king that was giving everyone a say in parliament, and for some ungodly reason, a group of people decided that they were going to storm the capital. This ended with Nation X splitting up into two different countries. I’m not going to get into the details of what happened too much but here is the reflection I wrote on Nation X if you’d like to read about it a bit more. 
To take a deeper look into the stages of a revolution, we learned about Crane Brinton’s Theory, which explains what happens in each stage of a revolution. We each made a creative diagram explaining Crane Brinton’s theory. Here is the one I made. 
Revolutions consist of a Incubation, Moderate, Crisis, and Recovery stage. You can take a look at my diagram to learn more about each stage. Another thing we did to help prepare for this project was reading Animal Farm by George Orwell as a class. Every week we did group reflections of what happened in the latest chapters and to end it we watched the Animal Farm movie as a class. If you didn’t know, Animal Farm is an analogy for the Russian Revolution so this helped us understand the anatomy and stages of a revolution. After reading the book, we wrote a reflection, connecting the book to Crane Brinton’s theory. Here is the one I wrote: 
After completing all this, we were assigned to our revolution groups. I was in a group with Jocelyn, Colton, Mateo, and Cale. You can check out their blogs for their takes on this project! To learn more about the events that took place in our revolution, we made a group graphic organizer. We made ours in Keynote, here’s the final product: 
We continued to develop our arguments and scripts until we reached our final script. We presented our mock trial during the PLP Winter Exhibition. If you’d like to watch the mock trial, here is a video. https://youtu.be/fWg2diyMqWs We did not win our case, however I feel we presented a really strong argument and I don’t think I would change it. (There may have been a bit of voter corruption but I wont get into that.) The competencies we studied during this project were Continuity and Change, and Connecting. I think I used Continuity and Change well in my Graphic Organizer and my script. I was able to relate pre-revolution America to post-revolution America in both and find differences and also things that stayed the same. I used the Connecting competency well in the Animal Farm response where I was able to connect the events of Animal Farm to Crane Brinton’s theory.
Answering the driving question
How might we as legal teams determine the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of a revolution? If you’d like an example of how to do this, you can watch the attached video of our revolution. The essential things to take away from this is that you must know the events of what happened in your revolution like the back of your hand. Using those events, you can create a well researched argument as to why your revolution is effective or ineffective. Thanks as always for reading all about my project! Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on this project, my blog, or anything else! Sincerely, Me
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