How can we, as legal teams, determine the effectiveness of a revolution? For this humanities project we were studying revolutions and there effectiveness. There were four revolutions that we could individually choose: Haitian, Xinhai, American and French. I chose to do the French Revolution. I knew nothing about the French Revolution but after this project I had a very deep understanding of the events that took place during the French revolution. In the end, we presented our learning and discoveries about this revolution through a scripted mock trial play to an audience and our teachers. Each revolution was on trial for being ineffective, this means that it did not:

– Reform political systems aligning with the voice of the people

– Increase rights and freedoms for the people

– Remove a dictator with sweeping power

– Achieve financial stability

– Improve standard of living

– Remove internal conflict

Our goal was to argue that it was effective based on Crane Brinton’s Theory and Stages of a revolution which I will talk more about later. In this post, I will use our reading of Animal Farm, research on the French Revolution, the Nation-X Society Simulator, and the mock trial itself to demonstrate my learning and growth through out this project.

HIGHLIGHTS

Animal Farm

As most people do at one point through out high school, we read Animal Farm by George Orwell to introduce and deepen our understanding of what a revolution really is. When I first started reading the novel, I didn’t fully realize until about the second chapter that this book was one big metaphor for the Russian Revolution. Through analysis and a couple writing assignments and responses, I was able to connect plot points in Animal Farm to Crane Brinton’s four stages of a revolution.

I learned about how a revolution works because you could really see evidence of this through out the novel. I could connect it to what we were learning in class and use it to guide my research on the French Revolution.

Nation-X

Nation-X was a real-life society simulator to show us how society works. I quickly learned that how a society runs (the pros and cons of it) are a huge factor in revolutions. There were people who were in lower classes than others, people earning less money, we couldn’t talk to people in other classes, and we couldn’t even step out of our own zones. I went to jail for talking to someone in a higher than class than me (they started the conversation!) and I had to basically bribe the guards to let me out. “A” and “B” (the lower classes) attempted to start a revolution as life for them was unfair compared to that of “C” and “D”. We stormed the capital to get our taxes back, luckily we got some of them back but our revolution wasn’t really successful because we got arrested.

This simulator really helped me understand why revolutions in history start in the first place because of people being treated unequally. But I learned that revolutions have to be really planned out and have a specific goal to be successful.

THE PROJECT/EXHIBITION

Research/Affidavit

Crane brinton’s stages of the French Revolution

Before we started gathering research or writing our script, we had to organize our revolution and it’s plot points on a timeline. This timeline followed Crane Brinton’s Theory of a Revolution that we were introduced to in the beginning of the project. Individually, we made smaller mind maps to organize these thoughts and then came together to make a big one on the board that you see above. At this point, I was really able to recognize the continuity and change that a revolution creates over time. By looking at France before the revolution when King Louis XVI was in power and comparing that to the Crisis stage and Recovery stage of it, it is clear to see the similarities and differences in this timeline. By looking at the “Continuity and Change” chart that we wrote below, we are able to see how this revolution effected people in power, people of France and the different classes.

Continuity and change

Once we understood what a revolution was we were able to start gathering evidence and research for why the French Revolution (the revolution that my group worked on) was, in fact, effective. All of this information (witnesses, letters from the time, etc.) was put into our Affidavit. All of this information was the information we knew we were going to use in our script and in our presentation to argue the effectiveness of this revolution.

Affidavit

While working on the Affidavit and research, it was a challenge to delegate work evenly to everyone. To start, it was already really hard to find the sources because at the time of the revolution and the Reign of Terror, no one thought that the revolution was good since people were dying everywhere and their lives were completely disrupted. I found that it was pretty limited since we had to argue that the French revolution was effective because majority of the sources that we were finding argued that it was ineffective. Although this was a challenge, my group found enough relevant evidence to argue our side, bringing us very close to the “prosecution” in our actual skit once we wrote the script.

The Presentation

 We rehearsed the script A LOT! We practiced in the classroom, in the drama room, and in our spare time and spare classes to make sure we knew it for the night of the exhibition. We also watched a couple videos in class to familiarize ourselves with how a court room runs, what you should wear in court, how you should speak, and some words that you can sue in your argument. This helped a lot in our actual mock trial because we knew by this point how a court case should run. Our Mock Trial along with the other Revolution’s mock trials were presented to parents and other members of the community who voted for guilty (not effective) or not guilty (effective). 

Mock Trial

The parents in the audience ended up voting guilty for our revolution. Although this was not our goal, the votes were very very close (only one or two apart) and I am very proud of how my group did in the trial.

Conclusion

Learning about the Russian revolution in class and researching the French Revolution in my group, I noticed something about all revolutions: They all have good parts and bad parts. We only really see the good parts and the good outcomes after time, it’s not something that people during the revolution would see. I found this really interesting, comparing our view now of revolutions to what people thought during. I think this is where my groups challenges really came in when we were researching because the citizens of France couldn’t possibly have seen the Reign of Terror as effective. But looking at the event now, we have the perspective,knowledge, and evidence to argue otherwise. I think this project was very interesting and I really liked learning about the French Revolution. I loved that we learned about it from a court perspective, it made it a lot more compelling and fun to learn about and work with others. Overall, I am proud of what I have accomplished in this project.

In my PLP Humanities 9 class, we have just finished a project called “People and The Environment.” It focused on how people effected the environment, both positively and negatively. We have studied and read different stories and articles about what climate change is doing and how it is impacting people through out the project. With this new knowledge, we had to write a letter to someone in the community who has the power to make a change based on an issue we are interested in. This could be someone from the school board, the district, the government etc. But I decided to write to Megan Curren, a Councillor at the District of North Vancouver who is interested in helping our local environment, just like me. I decided to write to her about the salmon population and kelp forest decline in BC, more specifically Deep Cove, hoping to raise awareness and funds for projects and research. With this letter, I hoped to answer this driving question:

“How do people and the environment affect each other?”

COMMON LIT READINGS AND HIGHLIGHTS

A huge part of this project was reading and responding to stories and articles that had an overall theme of climate change, it’s relationship with people, and the consequences of it in real life. The story that I think had the biggest impact on me and my learning is “The Sea also Rises.” It was the most compelling because it shows many different perspective of people who are being affected by climate change. Seeing this issue from different perspectives is very important because it really does affect everybody. 

The Commonlit readings really helped me with my letter as well. A story called “Quiet Town” was one that I really related to my letter because it has a common theme of how climate change is an issue right now, not later. It showed me that climate change not only affects living things like us and the salmon that I researched, but also big parts of our world and every day life like whole oceans. This shows how urgent the topic is and how easily it could affect many people. Thinking about how, living in a place surrounded by water, by 2050 oceans could rise to chest level and cover whole cities. 

Speaking more to different perspectives and climate change, one part of that that I found really interesting was how poverty and different social classes are affected by climate change and how these different groups of people affect climate change. Our world isn’t full of people who can afford things like electric cars and solar power systems, there are still billions of people that live in developing countries and communities that don’t have the chance or don’t have the opportunity to make a difference which is why it is important for me and people like me to try and make a difference with everything we can. The texts that we read in Commonlit taught us about climate change but also about the different perspectives involved which is one of the main competencies for this project. Commonlit and the short stories have taught me a lot about that competency and helped me develop it and use it in the letter.

THE LETTER

The first step in writing my letter was doing a bit of research. This came in the form of reading the news, looking into the Pacific Salmon Foundation and their beliefs, as well as Commonlit stories. This stage helped me develop my knowledge of how to analyze text. By reading the stories on Commonlit, I learned how to find theme, mood, perspectives, as well as different parts of a paragraph which are all important things to look at when analyzing a text. I took this knowledge from Commonlit and used it to analyze my own texts for my letter, like different articles and pages on the PSF website. With this skill, I was able to take pieces of what I analyzed and re-write them in my letter. This research and analysis stage also helped me recognize literary devices in text as I mentioned before with things like theme, mood, etc. It helped decide on my own theme for my letter being:

Climate change is affecting us now, not later

First letter draft⬇️

My final letter⬇️

Next came the writing. I’m not going to go too much into detail about how I actually wrote the letter as that it pretty straight forward, but a large and very important part of writing is the critique and revise stage. I ended up writing seven different drafts! We got teachers to critique, one-on-one peer critique, and critique from the older grades. Instead of just getting the teachers opinion and my opinion, it was interesting to have the opinion of multiple other students who have done this project or projects like this. I think it really improved my letter.

Finally, once we were all done writing our letters, it was time to mail them. We took a trip down to Deep Cove to find a mail box to send our letters to our selected audience. 

Us mailing our letters⬇️

Nolan, Faith, Alicia and Fraser

Overall I really like this project and I think I learned a lot of new skills based on the curricular competencies and the driving question. “How do people and the environment affect each other?” I was always interested in the environment and having a role in saving the climate but I never knew what to do. This project gave me the chance to make my voice heard and to make a difference. It’s very clear based on my own research just how people and the environment affect each other. Salmon are a huge part of our culture here in Canada and a large food source for a lot of nature so it affects us that the population is decreasing. But, this decrease is an affect of our actions so it goes both ways. This is just a small problem that I researched about how people affect their environment and how the environment affects us but there are many other examples. 

Class going to mail our letters⬇️

Thank you for visiting my blog, have a nice day.

Driving question: What can we learn from the past, and why does that mater to us today?

How it started how its going

Our goal for this project was to create a virtual museum about worldview, which basically means how we see the world. Before we created the museum we had to learn about the seven aspects of worldview: Values, Beliefs, Economy, Society, Knowledge, Time and Geography. 

Aspects of World view⬇️

The teachers assigned a group of students to each aspect. The people in your group were the people you worked with to create a room within the virtual museum. I was assigned to the knowledge group. My role in our group was the room designer which means I was in charge of creating the floor plan for the room.

knowledge floor plan⬇️

We based our art for our museum room from a meme template called How it Started How it’s Going, which shows one photo of how it began and one photo of how it’s going. (Free link example). We put up artwork that had two pictures in it: a painting from the Renaissance or Medieval times that represented our aspect of worldview and beside that a we photoshopped the same painting using the app SuperImposeX to show the modern day view of the painting, like adding a phone to represent value. 

here’s what our final museum looks like like

Driving Question

Our driving question for this project was What can we learn from the past, and why does that matter to us today? What happens in the past doesn’t just stay in the past. It affects the longterm future. We learned about Medieval and Renaissance times and how they still affect us to this day. One example is education. Before the printing press, only wealthy people had access to books, and this meant only they could read and learn about different things. When the printing press was invented in the Renaissance, more people from different classes could learn to read from books. Now that I know this history of books, I appreciate them more because I now have access to them and take advantage of books when I can. By understanding the past, we learn to take advantage of things that we might not have had in the past.

Curricular Competencies

Responding to Text: How did I construct an original personal, critical, and creative connection between myself, the text, and the world with supportive credible evidence? My worldview collage is a good example of how I made a connection between myself, the text, and the world. In my collage, I show through photographs how parts of my past shape my worldview. For example, I have three pictures of my dog, Molly, to show how having a pet has affected my worldview value that we should treat all animals respectfully. 

World view collage⬇️

Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to construct knowledge? I demonstrated that I’m an empowered learner by using my iPad skills to photoshop my face onto a painting using an app called SuperimposeX. I also added a graduation hat and an iPad as symbols of knowledge, which was the part of worldview I was representing.

Edited painting⬇️

Establish Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering? I chose this painting (add painting) because it shows a woman from the Renaissance holding a book, which was very rare because very few wealthy women would have had access to books then.  

Full museum floor plan⬇️

The driving question for this project was What can we learn from the past, and why does that matter to us today? What happens in the past doesn’t just stay in the past. It affects the longterm future. We learned about Medieval and Renaissance times and how they still affect us to this day. One example is education. Before the printing press, only wealthy people had access to books, and this meant only they could read and learn about different things. When the printing press was invented in the Renaissance, more people from different classes could learn to read from books. Now that I know this history of books, I appreciate them more because I now have access to them and take advantage of books when I can. By understanding the past, we learn to take advantage of things that we might not have had in the past.