Confidence is Key 🔑💪🙋‍♀️

Hello and welcome back to my blog! I am back with yet another post for my final PLP year. Only this time our project was based around Feminism with a driving question of “How Has the Feminist Movement Impacted Members of Our Society?” This project consisted of looking at the backstory of feminism, reading a memoir from a well known feminist, and then using all the information to create the final product of a full length essay. 

We started this project off strong by beginning to read Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. I found this very interesting as you got to see every aspect of her life. Whether this was professional, starting with her experience of attending multiple schools, to succeeding in multiple careers, or personally through her families story, you were able to see every detail. While reading this book we completed a series of Socratic Seminars, allowing us to discuss our thoughts and questions on select chapters. I feel this was a good way to show and extend my learning as I feel I was able to make many meaningful connections to other projects, the world, but also my life. During these conversations, we were tasked with formulating questions based on a handful of topics. I personally found this to be a good meeting point as it allowed us to all be on the same page in terms of what we were looking for in the book. However, I was also able to build deeper connections such as linking to The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. This is the self-help novel I recently read for careers which focused on the idea of confidence and why women often struggle to make it more then men. Michelle Obama talked a lot about her perfectionism and how it was always present whether that was in high school, university, her first career in a law firm, or through the many other opportunities she was challenged with. Throughout her memoir, you can clearly see how she embraced but then grew to recognize that despite how the world views you, it is not necessary always need to be perfect. This was present all the way through her time as First Lady, being challenged with obstacles that the average person could not relate to. Not only was she the first women of colour in this role, but she was also the first who wanted to use the resources given to create real change. Seen through her two main campaigns, “Let’s Move!” and “Reach Higher,” she was able to bring out what she truly wanted to see in the world. As much as I could talk on and on about what I took from her book, you can read more about my notes and key takeaways below!

During the time we spent reading Becoming, we also learned about the four waves of feminism, starting in 1848. We were able to gather this information through many articles and lectures from Mr. Harris. I think this was a very important step for our learning as it provided everything we would need clarity on prior to writing our essays. However, I will not talk too much about as you can read about it both in my essay and down below in my notes!

Throughout this entire process a few things stuck out to me, including the historical marginalization of Indigenous women during the feminist movements. This is why I decided to have this be my starting point when formulating my essay. When beginning this project we were informed that we would be needing someone to interview for our essay. However, when the time came to actually plan this out, my idea personally required a lot of backtracking and revising. My original plan (or what then became plan 1/6) was to interview Ashley Mitchel, an Indigenous Artist and Entrepreneur from Kamloops B.C. I formulated my pitch form, creating a solid call to action, interview questions, connections, and sources, before contacting her through email quickly after. Knowing how busy many business owners are, I knew it would be a long shot trying to get a response from her. After almost a week had passed with no response, I started to find back up options, soon emailing three more Indigenous owned companies. Once another few days had passed I wrote out an additional script for cold calls and called all four companies to see if I could reach the owners for a quick interview. Unfortunately I still had no luck, so I wrote out another two emails for other options which involved re-formulating my pitch form and essay ideas. Luckily, upon following up once again I was able to get a response and plan a time at the end of the week to interview my original option, Ashley Mitchel. This left me with some more waiting time which I used to finish the needed research for my essay and begin to write. Additionally, I also decided to interview my plan E interviewee just in case the other one ended up falling through which luckily it didn’t as I was able to learn so much from her insightful answers to my questions.

When it came to actually sitting down and completing the essay, I decided to do one large brain dump of everything and everyone I wanted to talk about. This allowed me to get the majority of my thoughts out, leaving a good chunk of space for my interview with Ashley. Once all the information was complete I was able to receive multiple round of feedback from both peers and teachers to gain extra perspectives on my writing. Surprisingly enough the most challenging part of this project was actually putting all my ideas together into an introduction and conclusion. Due to the fact that I had brought in a second interview, I had also brought in the additional topic of confidence that I mentioned above, inspired by The Confidence Code. So the difficult part for me was merging my original call to action with my newly inspired one, while still recognizing and sharing the message I was trying to give. 

In the end I was able to successfully connect all my ideas together to bring my essay to life. This included utilizing my two interviews, ideas mentioned in Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s book, as well as Michelle Obama’s experiences from her memoir Becoming. I am happy with how everything turned out and found this project to be extremely informative, but also a great way to improve my writing skills by creating an insightful essay. And hey, it only took around fourteen different copies of feedback and five drafts to complete! Anyways, I hope you enjoyed learning about this project and if you haven’t already taken a look at my essay please do so! 

-Makenna