Welcome to or welcome back to my blog. This is my blog post on the Ology of Apology project and the winter exhibition.
In this project, we looked at three different discriminatory and racist events in Canadian history. The driving question for this project was “How can we keep apologies for past wrongs alive so they are remembered – and not repeated – today?” The final product would be three monuments(one for each topic) in a museum that would be presented at our winter exhibition. The three events that we looked at were Chinese Head Tax, the Komagata Maru incident, and Japanese Internment. Chinese head tax was where the Canadian government imposed a tax that Chinese people had to pay to immigrate to the country. The Komagata Maru was a boat transporting people that wanted to move from India to Vancouver. When the boat arrived in Vancouver, it was kept in the harbour for two months before it was sent back to India. Finally, Japanese internment was when Japanese Canadians were imprisoned in internment camps after Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in WWII. The topic that I was assigned to focus on was Japanese Internment. Let’s get into it.
We started with looking at what made a good apology. We got into small groups and brainstormed attributes of good apologies. We then shared these to the group, coming up with a master list of traits of good apologies. After doing this. Then, we watched some politicians and celebrities apologize for various topics. We analyzed the apologies and came up with things that were wrong with them, and what they could do better. The most common things were insincerity, being scripted, and not accepting wrongdoing or redirecting blame. This will all be important later.
Next we watched a documentary about the three topics. You can watch the documentary here. One thing that I found interesting about these three events is that I had never hear of them. I had heard a little bit about Japanese internment, but I didn’t know any of the details. I had never heard of Chinese Head Tax or Komagata Maru. After watching the video on what happened, I was appalled that these events weren’t more known.
Next, we had a class discussion about our takeaways from the video. After that we reviewed historical perspective, and how it is important to look at past events from the point of view of people that were around during the time of the event. We would use this skill when we made our ethical judgment about the justness of our event. In order to make an ethical judgment, we had to learn about what ethical judgment is, so that is what we did next. An ethical judgment is basically answering the question, “Was this right?” It is a hard question to answer, and answers will vary, but the point is to try and use historical perspective and eliminate bias in order to come up with the most objective answer possible.
After learning about historical perspective and ethical judgment, we were assigned our topic. The topic that I was assigned was Japanese Internment. We then looked at a bunch of primary sources from our event, coming up with 8-12 sources we would use to tell the story of our event.
For our first keystone, we compiled our sources into a keynote, along with an analysis of each source. An average slide would look something like this.
For this keynote, we were instructed to use the “link to slide” feature to make an interactive presentation. By linking an image to a slide, you can make it so that when you tap on an image from a “home” slide, it sends you to a slide about the source like the slide above. This leads to an interactive experience that is hard to find anywhere else.
The last slide of this keynote brings me to where we are now. Our second keystone was an audio script and recording. We would be recording our ethical judgement on our topic, using historical perspective and eliminating bias. The last slide is my script for this recording.
Ethical judgment is a really important thing to know how to do, even when it is not related to school. Every day, we make ethical judgments about everything. When we go to make a decision, we use ethical judgment. When we form an opinion, we use ethical judgment. We use ethical judgment every day, without ever realizing it. I think that it is very important to use the same precautions that we use when we make ethical judgments academically when we make everyday ethical judgments. When making ethical judgments academically, we use historical perspective and eliminate bias. Although most everyday ethical judgments can’t use historical perspective, it is still important to use perspective. When making ethical judgments, most people never look at it from another perspective. Most people also don’t eliminate any internal or external bias when making everyday ethical judgments. This leads to warped judgments that might cause unnecessary disagreements among people. The next time that you use ethical judgment, keep this in mind.
After doing the recording we moved on to Keystone 3, which was the final monument. This monument would be presented at the winter exhibition along with a plaque that will show the symbolism and metaphors in the monument. We started by getting assigned a theme that was also present in Avatar, which was the theme of the exhibition. The theme that my group(Dana, Mickey, and I) was assigned was property rights and corporate greed. Using these themes, we brainstormed ideas for a monument. Dana came up with an idea to do a ratio project where we would make one boat or house for every 1000 boats or houses that were taken from the Japanese Canadians when they were interned. After settling on this idea, we started thinking about ways that we could show these. I came up with the idea of having a scene, with some water with boats in it, some sand or dirt with some houses, and a truck with a bunch of personal belongings in the back to show the personal belongings that were taken from the Japanese Canadians. Building off of this, we came up with the idea of putting the entire scene in the bed of a truck with Canada licence plates to represent that Canada was taking away the boats and houses. After settling on this idea, we started creating.
We started by making the houses. We had the idea to use origami to create the boats and houses to represent Japanese culture, as well as creating small models that we could easily put into a monument. After starting to create the houses, we kinda abandoned the origami and just made paper houses. After making the houses, we moved on to the boats. The boats we successfully made out of origami, and I think they look pretty good.
Next, we got to work on the rest of the scene and putting the boats and houses in the scene. We grabbed a cardboard box and got to work. We planned out the box to have an area for boats, an area for the houses, and finally, a mountain with a road going up it. There would be a small truck on going up the road with everyday household items trailing behind the truck to represent the personal belongings taken from the Japanese. After planning out the areas, we painted the water onto where the boats would be. Next, we got a bunch of smaller cardboard boxes and taped them to one side of the box. This would be where the mountain goes. Next we used paper mache over the boxes to create the shape for the mountain. Next, we painted the mountain and voila. Then, we started working on the road going up the side of the mountain. For this, we stuck toothpicks in the side of the paper mache and then cut out a piece of paper to fit around the mountain. Then, we painted the paper to look like a road and glue the paper to the toothpicks. Next, we painted the outside of the box. So far we had been working with one box as the bed of the truck, but after doing the road, we started working on the head of the truck. We glued two more boxes together and painted them. Next, we put some pieces of paper on the truck to add some details to make it look more like a truck. After that, we glued some gravel to the areas where the houses were to go and then glued the houses to the gravel. Next, we added some wheels to the side of the truck. That completed our monument. In total, this probably took around twelve hours of semi-productive work to create. I am very proud of how it turned out. Here are some photos of the final product.
Here is the plaque that we made to go along with our monument.
That concluded the work of this project. All we had to do now was present it at the winter exhibition.
This winter exhibition was quite hectic this year, and there was quite a bit that went wrong, but we pulled it together in the end. The theme of the exhibition was Avatar, the James Cameron movie released in 2009. Already, this was an issue. The grade 8’s were the only group with a project actually based around Avatar. Every other grade had to figure out a way to tie their project into Avatar. The grade 12’s didn’t even showcase their project at this exhibition. This caused a lot of peoples projects to become quite a bit different. The themes that we themed our monument on were changed halfway through, so we had to pivot to a different theme that our monument didn’t really fit into. On top of this, the room that we were in had very little plans. The 8’s and 9’s were tasked with coming up with decorations, food, and games for the rooms, and the room the Dana and I were in had very little decoration ideas and no game, so we had to scramble to get it everything together. In the end, we set up the room, presented for a couple of hours, and then cleaned up. I think that this was one of the best exhibitions that I have been a part of. All of the presentations I saw were really interesting, and I learned a lot in this exhibition. The connection to Avatar was a really interesting part that added a lot of perspective to the exhibition. Overall, this was one of my favourite projects that we have done. The learning that we were doing was quite interesting and I enjoyed presenting it at the exhibition.
Thank you for reading my blog post, and have a great day.
Leave a Reply