Well as you can tell by the title, it has been a month since we started this project. Its called, The case for a Nation, and we have made 6 videos! Each video had its own driving question, but we had one big one that applied to all our work, How can an understanding of nationalism in the past, help us understand today? All of the videos we created helped us to learn the answer to this question.
After all this time and work, I feel I understand the answer. Understanding what nationalism means is really important, and without understanding what the word nationalism means you can’t start to understand our world today. In class we defined it as, a pride and loyalty that citizens have for their country or nation. It often effects ones way of thinking and the decisions they make. It comes in good forms and bad forms, having the power to unite a country or tear one apart. When we look back at significant events that have happened in the past, we can often tie them to nationalism. People usually dont decide to do things for no reason, and the reason they do these things is often for their country or nation. The pride or loyalty they feel for their country or nation causes them to act out, to stand up for their nation or try and gain more power. When we understand this we can look back at these events and start to understand why they happened, what might have been going through this person or groups mind. Even if we dont agree with the reasoning of that event, it helps us to see and understand why they thought it was right, or just why they wanted to do this. All these significant events caused by nationalism have an impact on our world today. Without them our world would look a lot different. We start to see the connection of how nationalism from the past has impacted us today. Its not only nationalism from the past that effects us, there is nationalism all around you effecting your life without your notice. Wether it be big, like what our government decides will benefit our country, or small, in a community wanting to produce the best of one product.
That was a lot, and at the start of this project I didn’t even understand what nationalism meant. We started off by creating a mind map of all the different branches of what a nation is. The defined them. This activity really helped me understand the different groups and that the term nation can apply to many different groups. I remember going home and still not fully understanding, my mind would come back to the map though, it was something easy to understand and I could base my thoughts off of it. I didn’t fully understand the meaning of nationalism until a few activities later. Each activity helped build onto the base I had, the base being the mind map.
As we continued working, everything started falling into place. When we started to look into specific examples of nationalism, I started to see how you could define someone as a nationalist or how you could say that a certain event was caused by nationalism. The first example I looked at was the Crimean War. This event was really confusing for me, there were many different things happening, and the information I gathered from the textbook and the the reliable sources I found, often focused on very different aspects of the war. This made it difficult for me to put in place the events that made up the war. So I went and did one thing that has always helped me understand and organize my thoughts. I starting writing out all the different events and dates, and what each action lead to. When I finished I had what to me was a timeline of events and what each of their impacts were. I had gotten all of the information I had researched out and put it together in a way that made sense to me. There were times when I would go back and fact check myself. To do this I would go into the Know Your Story tab, in a numbers document where I had been gathering all my research. I would then look at the notes I had taken, or go right to the link I had put in there leading to the website with all the information. This was just one way I helped keep myself on task and understanding all that I was being taught in such a short time.
The next week was all about British North America and Confederation. This weeks video was a tutorial of some kind. From the beginning, when we were introduced to all the different types of videos, this one had always interested me. So when the week came that we were creating a tutorial, I was pretty excited, and then kinda scared. When I started to think about what this would actually mean the task seemed to become more difficult. This didn’t mean I didn’t want to challenge myself, I decided I would make my tutorial about something a little more outside my comfort zone then usual. This is how I ended up choosing a makeup tutorial, as this is something I am not super familiar with. I then had to decide how I would actually complete this task. I think I did the most thinking for this video as I had to create metaphors to represent each step and thing that goes into achieving confederation. When I had written my script and planned out location all I had to do was film. Of course this turned out to be more difficult than I had originally thought. The space where I wanted to film had the perfect background, but was in a really small room with little to no room for a chair, two people, and something to prop my camera up on. Once I had everything inside the small room I had to start to get creative with the way I placed things. Once I had set up, filming wasn’t to difficult, as long as I stayed far enough away so I couldn’t accidentally knock the camera over.
Editing this video was also harder than usual. When I have made videos before, I take clips that are the length needed. For this one I had one 30 min video to edit, and cut up. I had to decide what parts were useful and what I could get rid of. Something I wish I did with this video that I learned later was recording my audio first, this would have allowed me to know the exact length of my video before cutting up the video and speeding certain areas. The way I did it I had to edit the images twice, once before I recorded audio, and the twice after recording audio to try and adjust the picture length to fit.
This whole project was full of learning as you go. A lot of the time, because of the time crunch we were on we had less or no time to go back and fix our mistakes.
Throughout this whole project, we created screenplays for each video. This was really big for our competency designing texts. At the beginning, I sometimes found it difficult to think ahead an know what I wanted to say. I felt that I should be able to choose what I want to say in the time, only going in with a rough outline. By our last video I felt very different about this, it may have been the fact that I was creating a music video, or that over time creating video after video I learned how useful it is to have everything planned out ahead of time. Either way when I made it to the last video, creating a script and screenplay became a lot more important. I wouldn’t have the option to just make up whatever lyrics in the moment. It all had to be planned out so it fit the song, and covered all the topics and points I wanted cover in the 2:30s me and my partner Nya had.
All of these videos wether I realized it at the time or not helped contribute to my understanding of nationalism. This in turn helped me understand how it effect us today. One topic that I found really interesting and really helped me understand just how much nationalism effects us was Indigenous issues we learned about. How they were so pressent in the past but are still pressent today just going unrecognized by so many people. Each of the examples we were taught gave me a new perspective on nationalism. With each activity we did, I had a new way to think and learn about these things. Many things from the past dont just disappear, so the nationalism that was present years ago, still lives today, wether its as recognized or not.
“I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success, his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.”
– Chief Dan George