Hello! Welcome to the reflection of a new Humanities project that I’ve finished called Ology of Apology. Throughout this project I’ve learn a new topic called Ethical Judgment and I’ve also revisited Historical Perspective. The goal of this project was to create a memorial that would be displayed in the 2022 PLP Winter Exhibition. To reach this final product I strove to answer the driving question “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered – and not repeated – today?”. Throughout the creation of the answer I created 3 main keystones with additional checkpoints.
The first checkpoint/steppingstone I completed was called “Ethical Judgement – Interning Ukrainians”. I was tasked to write my ethical judgement on the interning of Ukrainians based on a passage I read. This was really important because I was able to understand and learn about what ethical judgment is. When I obtained this knowledge I was able to creating a writing that displayed my own ethical judgment giving the information provided. I really think this assignment helped my decision making skills by evacuating ethical implications and making judgments.
With my understanding of ethical judgment present I moved onto the next big learning factor of this project, Keystone 1. Throughout this keystone I was introduced to the topic of Japanese Interment. The goal of this keystone was to gather and present primary sources of the Japanese Interment that tell it’s story. In my opinion the most important part of this keystone was the primary source chart we created. This source chart was the root of the project and I feel it was this important because it was a record of all of the main events and perspectives that were present in the Japanese Interment era. When listing primary sources I tried to view the situation from different perspectives which showed my ability to represent supportable conclusions using authenticity and distinguishing bias.
When the primary source chart was completed I applied the information I learnt into a keynote. This keynote had a slide for each primary source as well as a description I created to display how the source connects to the Japanese Interment story.
After keystone 1 was created most of the building knowledge stage of this project was completed so I was able to move onto the next phase, Keystone 2. Within Keystone 2 I was tasked with creating an audio recording about our reasoning to why our topic/event was unjust or just. To create this recording I learnt about what makes a good script and learnt about previous apologies about my topic. When writing my script for my audio recording I thought about how the Japanese Canadian People were oppressed for unnecessary reasons. To build on my decision making competency throughout this keystone I tried to tell a complete and compelling story of the lasting impact on the Japanese Canadian community.
After keystone 2 was completed we moved onto the creation of the final product, a memorial. Once the final product was completed we were to display it in the 2022 PLP Winter Exhibition. The room we were assigned to was Abandoned Planet which showed a slight connection to our topic of property rights. To create the memorial we first chose a topic that related to the Japanese Interment and Avatar, Property rights, and brainstormed ideas for the memorial. We thought that property rights connected to the Japanese Interment because when the Japanese Canadians were released from interment all of there property was taken away leaving them with nothing, resembling the issue with the indigenous people in Avatar.
In conclusion this project gave me a lead way to build on my Analyzing, Decision-Making, and Processing curricular competencies. In addition to being able to identify, evaluate, and critically think about the events of the past, I was also able to build enough knowledge to answer the driving question “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered – and not repeated today?”. We can keep apologies of past wrongs alive by creating emotionally significant memorials that show the perspectives of those wronged. An example of this would be the memorial I created with my group because it addresses and signifies the hardships that the Japanese Canadians had to go through during and after interment.
What type of memorial would you create? Thanks for reading!
Alicia 😀
Special thanks to Nolan and Ben (the memorial group)