Here is my recommended song for this post.

 

 

 

 

So to start things off, we have been doing a unit since the beginning of the year all about the civil rights movement. We began by following the timeline of civil rights starting with the abolition of slavery up until the death of Martin Luther King. This took 2 months. For the last half of the last month we worked on our final project. This project had three pieces of criteria. It had to relate to Canada, had to incorporate some sort of history aspect and had to incorporate some sort of modern day aspect.

Our task was to create a video in pairs. We had to use a story/movement different from the civil rights unit. Highlighting our driving question. “How does an individual change a system?”

I was partnered up with Claire. When introduced to the project we threw around a handful of ideas until finally settling on Chinese-Canadians. We found the story of an individual, Chow Quen Lee, and began work on reaserch it and creating the video. Our story would incorporate the historical discrimination against Chinese-Canadians, Chow Quen Lee’s modern time story and, of course, it was all about Canadians.

This video took a lot out of me. We were first assigned our first draft on a Monday with th draft due on the next Tuesday. In that time we had to pitch an idea, storyboard, research, write a script and put together the video. It had to 5-7 minutes long. Now, the weekend in which we had time to work on it was a long weekend. So naturally people were going to be away and in my case claire was away for all four days of the weekend. I was working two of those days. So that gave me pretty much two days to research and record and put together the video. Let’s just say I worked with a cup of coffee in one hand and my iPad in another.

It took me those two full days to put it all together and it definetly still had improvements to do.

For the second draft it was Claire’s job to record the audio this time and I would then throw it all together in the video. This we got done. I also changed up the script sturcture to flow a little better.

After that draft we worked to try to make some unique footage that added a little more to the video. I worked on refining a section of slides using explain everything. Claire put together the intro. Then we had our project cut off date and everything was complete.

 

Our project was a very quick one, I found, but it showed a lot of understanding of how a movement can be lead by one person or multiple people and how deep seeded issues like racism have been brought to light a fair bit in recent years.

 

We, as a class, used the civil rights movement as an introduction into the topic of changing the system. Before most units I start off with some solid knowledge of the events, people and what happened in general. With the civil rights unit I was going in pretty much blind. I knew very little about it. I remember a conversation with my dad when we first started the unit. I said I was going in blind for this unit but I am really interested in the story and the topic and I feel like I should really try to learn and understand what happened. I wanted to commit to learning as much as I could to expand my knowledge.

I did exactly that.

As we went through each event of the movement I added my knowledge of what happened to my bank. I worked early hard to understand the mindsets of the people involved and what lead to the event and its aftermath. I found it really interesting how each event lead to the next until it became one thing after another until change occurred.

 

We also did weekly Socratic Seminars where we used a text or movie as a basis for discussion to develop better understanding of events, perspectives and ideas around the civil rights movement. Some discussions were really great and I enjoyed them. Others, mostly the movie ones weren’t as great. We had a hard time looking at the movies with a critical eye and so weren’t able to go as deep as we should of with our discussion. Overall I thought it was a unique and different way to discuss and develop ideas around the unit which helped build my own personal understanding as well as provide me a chance to share and reflect on my own ideas and perspective.

 

I also really enjoyed the book we read, Dear Martin. I know I touched on it in my blog post relating events of the movement to current times. I really liked how the book tied everything in from the past and really made it relatable in the sense that it is a more modern story we could see happening. It hit home the ideas of how today has been shaped by the movement and the fact that little has changed and people are still fighting for it.

 

Also during the unit I spent a night at Robbie’s house and we watched an Oscar winning movie. BlackKklansman, It was an amazing movie that I was able to truly appreciate and understand because of the unit. Despite the moving story at the very end there were a handful of shots from the events in Charlottesville and I watched it in complete shock but afterwards I was able to process it all with a new scope. I knew the civil rights movement and the history leading up to the events. I finally understood what was going on. It was because of this unit I now understand much more about the American story and in essence the North American story of racism.

 

I found this unit invaluable in learning something I feel everyone should learn. It was such a key movement in history that really showed the underside of the “American Dream” it exposed so much of the US and really put so many modern events into perspective. Now with the knowledge I have gained from this unit going forward I plan on using it to strengthen my projects, ideas and points. I’ve added another tool to the knowledge toolkit.