Hello welcome to and back to my blog! Today I am going to be talking about my most recent project in Humanities, This is Us 🇨🇦! In this project, we learned about Canadian identity and the different experiences everyone has as a Canadian. We learned a lot about this by sharing and having conversations about our different perspectives. The driving question for this project was: “How can we use conversation to help us advance the concept of a ‘just society’?” This driving question was meant for us to think about what an equitable nation is and what needs changing for us to achieve it.
We started off the project by learning about what it is like to be a Canadian and how everyone has a different story. Then we started to learn more about rights and learned more about what a “just society” is. We learned about the Charter rights and a lot about what it means to be a woman.
After learning a lot about what it means to live equally we all had to choose a specific topic about Canadian identity. Once everyone had a topic we all started to create an individual driving question. We could answer through an elevator pitch as well as answer any questions people may have. Whenever we get something like this assigned we have to start with Need to Know and that’s what we did.
My topic for this assignment was Women in the workplace. I then had to tie in how that might have affected Canada and that is what I did. The driving question that I created was: “How has being a woman in the workplace changed over time and what did this mean for Canada’s national identity?”
I then started to think about what type of questions I needed to answer to get a better understanding of this topic to create a strong elevator pitch. I created everything in the same document in Craft for it to be easier for me to find.
We then did a simulation on a human library with our pitches, we first got into similar topic groups. We would read our elevator pitches and have a conversation about it while asking questions. Everyone had a few minutes for each topic then once everyone went, we switched into groups with completely different topics. We did the same thing where everyone would read their elevator pitch and then have a conversation.
After we finished both groups we did some reflecting on how it went and how we could have done better for our actual human library.
We then had more conversations about Canadian identity. Some topics I could answer more questions on, because of the simulation we did, that before it I wouldn’t have been able to answer. Learning about Canadian identity can be so broad and it can be challenging at times for me but after a while, it got easier to talk about as well as ask questions.
We then had to set up the library for the event and our teacher put us in some roles. I helped with the setup of the library. We had 18 tables in the library, enough for all the books, and they all were evenly spaced so conversations could flow easily without any interference.
I brought in one of my family friends who had immigrated from Spain, her name is Carmen. I learned so many new things about her and her story that I had never known before.
One thing that I realized when I did this event was that It’s one experience to learn about someone you’ve never met before but it’s a completely new one when you learn things about someone you already knew. I’m so glad I got to hear her story and I’m glad that she felt comfortable doing so.
After the clean-up and the event altogether we did some more reflecting on what went well and what could have been better. We talked together as a group then went and did some personal reflections.
Here is the document that I put everything in, from my Need to Knows for my elevator pitch down to the reflections.
I liked how this project had a path to it instead of multiple things having to be done at once. I’m very happy with how much of a hit the Human Library ended up being and that everyone had a good time. I’m also very proud of all the help I gave to creating the setup and having a natural flow.
For next time I think we could have done better on advertising the event and making sure it doesn’t interfere with traffic.
Hearing people’s stories during the human library helped me understand that there are multiple levels to having a just society and that we are definitely on the way to creating one. Even though there are so many unfair things that happen in our world hopefully one day we all can create an equal environment for everyone.
That’s the end of my post, thanks for reading!!