Welcome all to my final Humanities Project of the year this. In this project we learned about the Holocaust. The Driving Question was: How can multi-modal communication enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues? Now full disclosure this was supposed to be our Spring Exhibition project and it kind of was but it didn’t really relate to the Holocaust. That was more of our Spring Exhibition which I will be posting later. The final assignment for us was to write a literary critique on the book Maus by Art Spiegelman. But let me take you on the learning to get there. 

Firstly we got a deep dive into the Holocaust and get all of the facts and information. Through different methods of communication. Articles, photos, movies/documentaries, and presentations. 

Over the course of the project we were also analyzing how effective different methods of communication were as per the driving question. We were tasked with writing a paragraph on why stories are an effective way to learn. This was one of the first assignments we did and I felt it was great warmup for analysis.

 

 

Now I could go on about every fact I learned in this project. But due to the nature of this topic I feel its better if you go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Website to learn about all the details. Just because they can do a much better job of covering the facts in the right tone with the right images then I can. 

 

United States Holocaust Memorial

 

 

Throughout this project we did lots of analysis and writing about why stories are more impactful depending on the version they were told in. At each checkpoint I felt myself getting a lot better as my brain began to catch on to the things I should be noticing. To provide an example we read an article called Holocaust in a few Pictures in which I was asked “Why did the Creator Use so Many Pictures?” in which my answer was to provoke emotion and vivid imagery which was a lot better then some previous attempts.

 

The main thing of this project was a writing an essay of literary critique on the book Maus by Art Spiegelman. Maus is the story of Art’s father Vladek but written as a graphic novel which, in my opinion, enhances the novel as the drawings make the story much more impactful. Maus also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 becoming the first graphic novel to do so. 

 

Moving onto the essay itself. We were allowed to pick our own facet of the book to analyze and I picked the physiological and PTSD aspects of the book. I chose this because it was the only lens that made sense to me. Specifically I chose to focus of behaviours as a result of PTSD the main ones I focused on were hoarding and relationships. The hoarding one is interesting because a long time ago I read something about hoarding and its causes and that info was triggered when I read Maus which is how I formed the connection. ⬇️

Essay

 

My essay went well overall I had to revise it once for some formatting and repetition in my writing but now its pretty good. The confusing part of this project is that it was meant to be our exhibition but then some stuff got crossed with our B.C First Peoples Course and we did a jointed exhibition with both courses. Anyways the answer the to driving question is: Using Multi-Modal communication can increase the effectiveness of learning and retention, because visuals and other things people can relate or interact with makes them more likely to retain the info. It’s just like in this PLP program hands on learning, field studies etc makes it more engaging causing us to be interested or involved in the topic thus helping us retain and learn. 

Thanks for reading