Hello all, Welcome to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about a project I’m just wrapping up. This project is called “A Case for a Nation” and it’s about Nationalism and the unity and Identity that come with it. We specifically learned about Nationalism in Canada, but some people picked different places to research.
“How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today”
We started off our project with a lecture/class discussion on the timeline of the events we where working with and the general idea of the project. The first milestone we did was an activity called “Canadian Check”. For this activity, we made a short video with a specific audio doing some things that are stereotypically Canadian. We used these things to show nationalism within Canadians.This introduced us to the Idea of nationalism and identity within a nation.
To explain this a little, we tried to combine a few common Canadian stereotypes. Canadians dress inappropriately for the cold weather, we are all hockey players and we say “ay”. That last one got compromised by the audio, so you couldn’t here it, but it’s there.
Current events
After briefly looking into the concept of nationalism, we worked on an assignment to understand nationalism in todays world, thus revealing the “Current Events Presentation”. For this, we researched a relatively current event that was happening around the world that could relate to Identity and Nationalism. We than made a document with some images, sources and facts. We than presented our documents to a small group of people through the first portion of the project. I did my presentation on a new event in the 2022 Winter Olympics, called “Big Air Skiing”. Sadly I did not get to present, as I was away, but I was really looking forward to it. I definitely improved on my research skills (which is alway good), and my presentation creating. I researched 3 different topics and gathered over 10 facts for each. I also worked hard on making my document look organized and hooking.
Building knowledge
Before we split into our final groups for the project, we needed a bit of a backstory as to where we are in history. We learned about Upper and Lower Canada, the Canadian Confederation and nationalism across the world. To learn about these things, we did three activities. To learn about nationalism as a whole, we read a 1-3 page document on a few different topics and we created a chart with some questions on it. To learn about Upper and Lower Canada, we did a simulation called the “Rebellion Scene Investigation” taking us back to the two territories to explore there differences and talk to the kind of people who lived and worked in the French, vs English parts of Canada. This part of the project was a time to take a historical perspective from the different types of people back than to learn what life was like.
The product
During the trip I took, we split into groups of 3 based on which topic we chose. There where about a dozen example topics to chose from, but some groups came up with some on their own. I picked a group who already had three, who’s topic was “Quebecois. French Nationalism in Canada” we worked in our group for a few classes to research, discuss and create our final product. Our big assignment was to create 3 images that represent your topic.
The people in my group also created 3 images, my classmates blogs are here, if you want to see there view on the project. -insert links- We picked in class one image from everyone to make a compilation to show French Nationalism in Canada. Each groups image got posted to in instagram account called: Historical Perspectives 2022
Growth
In this project, I learned a lot about the history of Canada, team growth and communication and researching skills. I accomplished many of the goals I set for this project and I enjoyed the experience.
Thank you for reading my summary of this project and have a good day -Declan