Hello! I’ve started a new Humanities project called “A Case For a Nation”. This project was about researching a topic of the past that relates to nationalism and how content within that historical topic can symbolically be represented through an image/post. The driving question that I strove to answer throughout this project is “How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?”. I feel like this project was a bit shorter than usual, but maybe that was just because I had fun doing it! I also I think this project definitely helped me improve on many different curricular competencies, but I specifically tried to improve on my critical and reflective thinking competency. I think I was actually able to do this throughout my constant improvement on the keystones we did.
We did many aspects within keystones and the very first one we did was call “Canadian Check”. To do this activity I was put in a group and we created a short video about Canadian nationalism stereotypes. I don’t think I necessarily improved my competencies (although I did use collaborating to complete the video), but I so think this was a great foundation of my understanding of what we would be doing throughout this project.
The next important learning activity we did was “Current Events Presentation”. To do this activity we picked a current event and connected it to nationalism. To show this creation we were tasked to insert it into a basecamp document that we gave the basics of current events Who, What, When, Where, and Why. The topic I chose was the “ Day 3 Winter Olympics” because I think the Olympics is a great way to explain nationalism of each competing country/nation. I think this activity made me more aware of nationalism and it’s connection and impact to the world around me. I also think this was a great way to practice and improve on my communicating skills.
I also did a few more activities that I found very helpful to learn from was the “Confederation Simulation”. This was a simulation to put us in perspectives of colonies involved with the confederation. We created a ‘proposal’ to join the confederation and what we, as a colony, would need to join. I think this was a great way to connect to nationalism in the past because I understood struggles and was able to define that those qualities help improve nations today. Yet, with the overall content of the activity I think I could have improved on the quality and answers because I know I could’ve used my group’s ideas better.
The next activity, that I would like to give an honourable mention to, is “Nationalism jigsaw”. The way this was completed was by everyone going around the room to different information sheets and learning about different past events of nationalism. I think this was a great way for me to start one of the most important tasks, topic research.
If you’ve read my blog before, in Revolutions on Trial and People and the Environment, I tend to always to refer back to my notes as something that I found very helpful and important to my learning. Guess what! I think that once again (sorry about the bad/wordy English). Probably one of the most important parts of the project, which also wasn’t included in the keystones, was my topic research. We were tasked with researching a historical topic that related to nationalism and that we would be basing our final instagram* post on. My topic was American Nationalism/Manifest Destiny and I think I actually learnt a lot of important information and was certainly able to use and improve my use of the critical and reflective thinking competency.
After the research stage was complete I was able to write a caption, in which we would include in the final post explaining the media. To write the caption we had to write it in 100 words (and as you can tell by this blog post, that isn’t easy for me to do). I also had learnt so much information on the manifest destiny and I was worried about reducing the size into a Summative paragraph. After I bit of deconstruction I had a caption that I was proud of.
Once our individual caption was finished we brought it to our topic group to help finalize. The people in my topic group were Makenna and Cooper. They were both really helpful and gave strong ideas to include in our final caption that we created together. Our strategy was to read over everyone’s caption and take different sentences and form them into one (with slight editing as well).
Once our caption was finished I was able to step on the path to start my journey to create the final product, “ The final post* ”. Since the caption was finished I started to work on the image that the caption would represent. At the start we complete three images falling under three different categories. These three categories were a drawn on image (drawings on a photo related to our topic), a quote (from some badly important in our topic), and a choice (where we chose any medium to create). To complete these three images I had to reflect on my notes and decided what key aspects I wanted to symbolize and I also had to use my creative thinking skills to design everything.
From these three images I chose one to present in a photo gallery and I chose the ‘choice’ image. My choice image was a fake ad telling people to join the manifest destiny, using upbeat sarcastic remarks. I got mostly positive feedback and also some specific feedback on explaining what I could improve on. After this gallery walk our groups had to each pick one image, but under different topics. We all decided to pick which ones we thought looked best, leaving Makenna to have the quote, Cooper to have the choice, and I had the drawn on. I was pretty happy with this because I noticed that this was the one I could improve the most on, and I did. I referred back to my notes to add more symbolic references and I summit that drawn on image as my final image. This final image was then placed in our group’s instagram post:
View this post on Instagram
Lastly, one of the more important activities, in my opinion, to conclude this project was the “Opinion Piece”. To create this we were tasked to write a 250 word paragraph about our opinion of the our topic, mine being the manifest destiny. I actually made quite a few drafts but two of them were quite different from one another. At first I create a paragraph that was way above the word count and was focused less on my opinion of the manifest destiny and focused more on the facts. With this I got a bit of feedback from my peers and I created a new paragraph that I felt portrayed my opinion much more in dept and clearer. I think this really shows that I can improve as a learner and use evidence to display a judgement on a topic.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed learning about the concept on nationalism as well as improving on my critical and reflective thinking skills. I do think I was able to understanding different aspects of the curricular competency “Critical and Reflective Thinking” by supporting my opinions and understanding with detailed pieces of evidence. I was also able to communicate compellingly by exchanges ideas that covered multiple viewpoints as well as understanding the identity consumed within these viewpoints described. I was also able to take historical perspective by explaining different views on the events of the past. With this I’m able to answer the driving question for this project “How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?”. Well… An understanding of nationalism of the past can make us able to define flaws and implement modernization into our actions of today. Meaning we can realize why nation’s are the way they are in the present and build on flaws or achievements and improve our own sense of nationalism.
Thank you for reading this blog post! Now a question to you. How do you express nationalism for your nation?
-Alicia 😀
Credits:
Topic groups members: Makenna and Cooper
*Instagram post will be linked once link is provided to me