Hello and welcome to another learning portfolio post! We have just completed a project based around ethical judgement by learning about historical perspective. We used the information learned to create our final product, a monument on our topic. This monument was then displayed in the 2022 Winter Exhibition!

The driving question for this project was “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered, and not repeated today?”. I answered this by completing the three important keystones.

We started this project off right away by learning about Ethical Judgement. We watched a video and completed a few worksheets. With the information gathered I was able to deepen my understanding by writing my own ethical judgement on the governments action in Interning Ukrainians during WWI. I feel this quick write helped me understand the difference between something being history, a fact, or a judgement.

Using what I learned in the quick writes I was able to move onto keystone 1. The goal of this keystone was to create a keynote to tell the story of your topic. My topic for this was the Chinese Head Tax. As soon as I was introduced to my topic I started my primary source chart. This chart was a spot where you could insert all the sources you felt best told the story. It also included questions to answer on each source. Once I had all my sources I was able to move onto creating the keynote with the information I gathered.

The next steps were to create my keynote. In this keynote you could tap on each source revealing a summary explaining the source and how it connected to the overall story. I felt that since I had already completed the questions in the primary source chart, that describing each source would be easy. I feel like my keynote did a good job of telling the story of the Chinese Head Tax and after a few small revisions I felt very accomplished on this task.

After learning and understanding the story of the Chinese Head Tax in keystone 1, I was able to complete keystone 2. This keystone was combining the first few quick writes we completed on ethical judgement with the given topic (The Chinese Head Tax). We started off this keystone by revisiting ethical judgement along with watching every topics official apology from the government. When watching the apology’s the government made I gained a good understanding on what I wanted to talk about. This brings me to the next steps I took. We needed to create an audio apology using the evidence from keystone 1. The first thing I did to accomplish this was create the very much needed script. In my script I chose three points to talk about as my evidence. In this script I made sure to support my judgement with evidence on why the Head Tax was unjust. Then I was ready to record the audio version of this. In my audio and script I feel I did a good job of telling the story of the Chinese Head Tax while also talking about the reasons the government needed to apologize. I did end up revising my audio as the sound quality was not the best.

After completing keystone 2 I was ready to move onto creating the final product. The goal was to create a monument that shows the story of my topic. For this we were put into small groups of three. If I’m being completely honest me and my group were completely stumped. We were struggling to come up with ideas on what we could make and show for our monument. After some brainstorming we came up with the staircase idea. As soon as we came up with the idea of the staircase all the ideas started coming to us. We decided to build a 3D staircase to represent the barriers Canada threw at the Chinese immigrants once they arrived. Our structure illustrates how Canada was on top and in control. The structure is an analogy of the Canadian Government taking steps out from under the Chinese people. I am very happy with what we created and how we were able to brainstorm to fix any problems we found that came our way. 

Chinese Head Tax Monument

2022 Winter Exhibition:

Once we completed our projects we showcased every monument in the 2022 Winter Exhibition. The theme for the Exhibition was Avatar so each room had multiple people form each grade showing their projects. By the time the Exhibition came around I feel that after all the work we completed I knew my topic well enough to present to all the parents and teachers. 

Overall I am so happy with how my project turned out as I spent a lot of time on each keystone. Throughout this project I learned how to critically identify events from the past. I learned that we can create monuments to remember and not repeat past wrongs. This is what my group successfully did when creating our monument showing the perspective of those treated unfairly. Thanks for taking the time to read my post and I will be back with more shortly. 

– Makenna