The Juno Beach Legacy

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today’s post is on a recently completed humanities project entitled Save Juno Beach! This project was on World War II, specifically, on the Battle of Juno Beach. In this project, we developed our skills on note-taking, determining historical significance, and rhetorical analysis.

Driving question:

Why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre?

The Juno Beach Centre in Normandy, France, is an educational and memorial centre for the Canadian troops who gave their lives at the very significant Battle of Juno Beach. It is very important to Canadians that this centre is preserved, along with the sacrifice of the soldiers on D-Day. I go into detail on the driving question in my final piece of writing but this is a brief answer.

To begin this project, we had to get a basic understanding of the events before and during WWII. Our knowledge on this topic was extremely limited so we took a ton of notes. I personally enjoy the note-taking format and learned a ton, however I feel like we had to rush through a ton of information very quickly. I took a ridiculous amount of notes. If you don’t believe me, check out the link below.

WWII notes

Our first keystone was determining historical significance. Using our notes and knowledge of historical significance, we had to pick the three most important reasons why WWII was significant. The criteria for historical significance is as follows:

People at the time thought it was important
It affected a lot of people
It affected people deeply
It affected people for a long time
It still affects attitudes or beliefs today
It led to other important events

Using this criteria, I picked three ways that WWII was historically significant for Canada as a nation and wrote about each.

Battle of the Atlantic

2. Supplies production

3. Women in war

For our second keystone, we drifted away from WWII, and began learning about rhetorical analysis and what makes good writing. Through our investigations, we learned what rhetoric is and how to analyze it. In this keystone, we began to put some thought into what our final multi-paragraph composition will look like and what our intentions are with it. The first part of this keystone was to hand in a chart that shows the angle we want to take with our rhetorical analysis.

Save Juno beach rhetorical analysis

The second part was to analyze a text. This text took me a while to fully understand the tone, but it was interesting to learn how to properly analyze what an author is trying to convey with their text.

Summary

The third keystone was the actual writing process. Once I’d found my topic and angle, I started writing my composition. The first step was to find my thesis statement. After some thought and revision, I landed on “Because of the significance of the Canadian contribution at Juno Beach and the long-lasting effects of D-Day, we need to preserve the Juno beach Centre from modern developments.”

The second step was to find the ethos and pathos that was to be included in the writing. This is the chart I made to help me once the writing began:

The third step was to sit down and write the composition. To start, we discussed in class that the first draft of anything is going to be awful. To be fair, my first draft was pretty bad. I had some bad wording and lots of structural and factual issues with my composition. PLP had been preparing me for this keystone since grade 8. My essay went through eight rounds of critique before it was done. I honestly think I could’ve gone for ten but alas, I didn’t have any time left. I got to work on my critiquing skills as well. The critiquing process was just trading compositions with however many peers and hoping it turns out well. I also learned a lesson of advocating for my ideas. I learned that sometimes you might get critique that you completely disagree with and you have to make sure you stay true to your original ideas.