Well it’’s right before spring break and we’ve finished up our project in Humanities. This project has been all about World War Two, it was called Hidden Chapters. The driving question was, How might we use stories to better understand the causes and consequences of WWII? To help us understand this question we did a verity of activities that all lead to our final product, a podcast episode. To get to there we read a book, did researched and watched videos about he war.
Podcast episode
For my novel study I read, The Cage. Personally I am a reader so I enjoyed this part of the project, I didn’t even mind taking notes on the book because I found the story so interesting and I wanted to note those parts down. I think this helped my understanding off the book because I wasn’t just reading and taking it in right away like I normally do. I stoped to take the note which gave me time to think about what just happened or what I’ve highlighted actually means. This is something I would do again going forward into our next novel study. I think overall it helped my comprehension of the text and I was able to remember more of the significant points in the story.
When it became time to choose a topic for our podcast episode, I was able to look back at these notes and find a common theme for what I had been interested in. In the end I found I was most interested in how the people being prosecuted felt, what it was like going through such a horrific and difficult time. How it changed them, and what made them keep going? I found I was often thinking about that while reading the book, what in these peoples lives gave them the hope or courage to not give up. When I started writing my script for my podcast I had to look deeper into this and really think and find places/examples in the book where they mention it. This was a lot easier because of the notes I took. In my podcast I also wanted to talk abut the importance of sharing survivors stories, what they can tell us and how they can give us a different perspective on things.
When it came to the actual production of the podcast, everything came fairly easily. I found a quiet spot to record and read from my script in as smooth as a voice I could. Where I had trouble was fading the music in and out, something you think would be fairly simple. A quick google search helped me out and I was able to complete my podcast.
I am proud to say for both the intro music and cover art, I was one of the finalists. When I was creating the cover art I really wanted to incorporate the fact that we were connecting our topics to novels we read. Immediately my mind went to using a book cover as the background and adding text on top, so thats exactly what I did. It’s nothing complicated but it reflected part of our project I felt was important.
My intro music submission
What I took away from all the work we did and the research I did for my project, was the fact that we can learn so much from peoples personal stories and accounts of these events. For me reading and listening to holocaust survivors stories allows me to see into the more personal side of things. I’m not just hearing these statistics, which are also important to learn, but I’m hearing about what scared them, what their life was like and how it drastically changed. Understanding the events they went through and the impact it had on them, their family, friends and neighbours can help us understand some of the consequences of the war. Their stories can tell us about loss of many different kinds, physical and emotional trauma they were put through, and how they felt after the war knowing all this had happened to them. Its important we try and understand these things as to not repeat something as devastating as this again. Learn their stories, hear their truth, share the history.