The impact of World War II cannot be understated. It caused the death of millions, reshaped countries, and lead to the formation of some of the world’s most powerful organizations. Of course this only scratches the surface of WWII’s impact, so for this project we investigated the driving question:
What role did the conflict of World War II play in shaping Canadian identity
As our final answer, we wrote an essay focusing on one facet of WWII’s impact on Canadian identity and collected them together into a class zine[^1]. This project focused on the core competency of Communication, consequently much of our time was spent researching information and synthesizing ideas.[^2]
Before we get into the work, I’d like to quickly address what we would be doing with our final class zine, the plan is to give a copy to two organizations. First the Lynn valley legion, a local veteran organization. Second, the Juno Beach Centre, a Canadian WWII museum located by one of the 5 beaches targeted in the June 6 attacks on normandy (D-Day). Alongside the Zine we would be making a donation of $500 on behalf of the Lynn Valley legion to the Juno Beach flag sponsorship program.
After reading that last sentence you might be wondering where we could get $500 for a flag, but the answer is quite simple: There are around 50 PLP 10s, so with $10 from each of us, that’s $500 no problem. To get this $10, we would be participating in an act of community service, and finding a patron to sponsor this service. Throughout this project, we learned of the idea of service as being the act of assistance to some entity, be that a person, organization, or a community as a whole, without the expectation of reward.[3^] For my act of service, I did a cleanup of Victoria park with my friend, Caelum. I wrote a description of this act for part of the zine, but it was a very odd experience as we had to write in the third about ourselves, and for lack of a better segue, here it is:
Finn lives in lower Lonsdale, for his act of service he did a cleanup of Victoria Park alongside his friend. He was surprised at the amount of trash they were able to clean up, clearing the entire park in a little over an hour. This small act benefited all users of the park by making it an overall more enjoyable place. During this experience, Finn observed that service does not need to be a visible activity, nor does it need to be for anything more specific than a community as a whole. This speaks to Canadian values of safety and community, and the notion of service without expectation of reward such as recognition.
Now, let’s get back to the meat and potatoes of this project for a bit. We started off this project with a bit of context into the interwar period, from the end of WWI, into the great depression, and the rise of leaders such as Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. We the covered all the main events of WWII, from the initial invasion of Czechoslovakia and eventual declaration of war, to D-Day and Germany’s surrender. We then circled to look at Canada’s role in the war, through manufacturing, infantry, and naval contributions.
With a solid foundation of knowledge on the war, it was as good a time as any to actually start to look at how it impacted Canada in particular. It also happened to be when we started learning a new skill, so why don’t I talk about them both. The skill was Smart Brevity, a system for communicating information in a concise and readable manner. It’s built around the concept of Axioms, filters though which you can interpret information. Within these axioms visual flow is key, long paragraphs are broken up into digestible chunks with bullets, and the sections themselves are kept concise. With the skill of smart brevity, we wrote one Smart brevity note on a simple topic. For mine, I wrote about the development of Canada’s social security network. you can read the note right here:
https://finn.craft.me/sb-social
The last stretch of this project was the creation of the final essay, which would answer the driving question. As per usual, we started with a thesis. Unlike for the World Needs More Canada project, I did struggle a fair bit with choosing a topic, as nothing had sparked my interest yet. Eventually, I settled on postwar immigration, specifically how it spiked following the war, and it’s longterm effect on Canada’s population. The research and writing was fairly standard, the main difference being that MLA formatting was a requirement, rather than a suggestion. Once the essay itself was done, It needed to be formatted as a zine page. This meant a smaller font, columns, and images, to make it more visually appealing, and compact enough to fit 50 essays in 1 book.[5^] And that’s a wrap for the writing, it really wasn’t anything special.
The driving question for this project was “What role did the conflict of World War II play in shaping Canadian identity”, and given the entire essay is simply a response to that, here’s my answer:
The postwar immigration wave and following economic boom lead to Canada’s multiculturalist society.
Still not convinced? How about you read my essay, either the plain MLA version or the slightly less plain Zine version, If you would like to read the class zine as a whole, I don’t have a link, sorry.
To summarize this project, alongside learning about WWII, I also learned how to use smart brevity, sharpened my MLA skills, and helped make a zine. Thank you for reading along through this journey, that’s all for this post. So long for now.
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[^1]: zine |zēn|, noun: a small, non-commercial, self published magazine.
[2^]: I mean, that’s what happens in most projects, but especially so here.
[3^]: This definition does invalidate school service as true service, as you are rewarded with service hours ( it also means that service as part of a project, for a grade, is technically not true service too but don’t worry too much about that 0 )
[4^]: At least for our current project, it’s probably important to note that we will be covering other aspects of WWII later on, such as the internment of Japanese Canadians.
[5^]: I’m very happy to say that the column layout and the font[6^] were both my suggestion.
[6^]: The font in question was Baskerville, which is my current favourite font for writing, most of my recent essays are in Baskerville. The exception was actually this essay. Although the zine was in Baskerville, I wrote my actual essay in Computer Modern Serif, a font created by the creator of TeX, and author of The Art of Computer Programming: Donald Knuth. I would recommend, it’s a nice font.