Hello anyone and everyone, Welcome to my blog.
Today I’m going to be talking about our most recent project. This is a humanities project about Truth and reconciliation, where we explored a book called The Marrow Thieves. We also used art to look at historical and contemporary indigenous conflicts and issues.
Driving Question: How can art and text reflect both the history and our current place in time?
Art and text can reflect history and our current time by influencing people’s emotions and views on things and events. Art can give you a different perspective on things happening in the world. You might be able to see through the artist’s point of view, or even a whole group of people’s point of view. This can help us understand history and learn more about the ways people think and see things. Art can also help us in our current place in time, by showing the diverse ways that people can express their views and emotions.
Learning Process
We started this project with you guessed it! A piece of art. This was different from most of the rest of the project because we were making the art instead of studying it. I guess the idea behind it was to understand what art means, and what it can help us express. We made an “I am from” poem for our Keystone 1. And “I am from” is just a poem that describes you and where you’re from. Here’s the one I made as a quick example:
I am from
After our entrance to the art world, we started our book as quickly as possible. We read The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline throughout this project. To keep track of our reading, we used a “reading journal” and had a small group discussion every Tuesday and Friday to share what we thought about the book, and where we were at. To keep track of all our reflections, notes, evidence and anything else, we used a reading journal. I don’t like this style of “book report” I guess, but here’s what I got:
The journal was our Keystone 1, but to hand it in, we had to finish the book, so this didn’t get done until recently. Let me fill you in on what happened in between. Keystone 2 was split into 3 parts and is where the majority of the “art stuff” was. The 3 parts were: History and Art, Contemporary Issues, and Civil Dispute and Art. For each part, we found an indigenous conflict or issue in the category. Then we researched an art piece (or a few) and wrote a paragraph (or a few) on how it relates to the issue we picked.
Keystone 3 was kind of just an extension of this. We chose an overarching issue or conflict to tie all our learning to, and made a collage to show this. The idea was that the collage would have a QR code that would link to our Keystone 2 work. Here’s my end product:
Competencies
There were three competencies that we worked on during this project:
Analyzing
Communicating
Decision making
We used the first two a lot, whether it was analyzing The Marrow Thieves or the conflicts and issues in Keystone 2. Using these skills helped us take the information we needed from texts, and be able to explain it and display it to others. We did this when reading, researching, discussing and writing. The last compitency I don’t think applied to this project as much, but we definantly used it through Keystone 3.
Overall, this project went smoothly for me, and I think I learned a lot. Much of the content covered was points and events I was already familiar with, but you can always learn more details. I also had a chance to work on making my work look, and sound good, which I don’t often do.
Thanks for reading, and signing off for now
-Declan