Hey, all, It’s me, Dylan. Today, I’ll be writing about our latest project in Humanities, Case For a Nation. This was a really interesting and very immersive project. I was very excited for this project and it far exceeded my expectations.
This project was about nationalism and about learning how our knowledge of nationalism in the past can help us better understand the present day.
We started this project by making a “Canadian Check” video. This was basically supposed to entitle things that were stereotypically Canadian. Here’s mine:
I enjoyed this activity since I enjoy editing. It was cool to reflect on my own Canadian nationalism, since I usually don’t really think of myself as a super patriotic person. I’m happy that I live in Canada and I love my country, but I don’t usually think much of it. This activity helped me realize that I really do value and love the country that I live in.
Next, we did a little activity on Upper and Lower Canada. Honestly, I found this to be a little bit boring. I wish it was a little more immersive. I was also kind of zoned out for this activity since I was a little tired that day. It was also kind of a strange way to be introduced into the topic seeing as we were kind of thrown into it.
After this, we began studying current events. We were told to make a presentation about a current event of our choice. The event just had to relate to nationalism. I chose the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. I actually finished mine about an hour before Russia declared war on Ukraine. I decided not to change it because it was really interesting to take a look about an hour back in time and to reflect on how much my views on the conflict had changed in just a few minutes.
After that, we did an activity pertaining to the confederation of Canada. We each were assigned one of the original provinces and had to represent that province in the simulation. I was assigned Nova Scotia. We originally wanted to have a railway built that would connect us to the mainland and demanded that we wouldn’t join the confederation unless we were granted that railroad and that the confederation elected Halifax as its capital, seeing as Halifax is the main ice-free port in Canada. The capital being there would also bolster our fishing industry and make connections and communications with Europe a lot easier, as the capital would be on the Atlantic coast. In the end, our demands were not met and we decided that it would be in our best interests not to join the confederation. In actual history, all of the provinces ended up joining the confederation, however in our in-class simulation, this was not the case.
After we did this, we left for Loon Lake, which was a whole other story, and a whole other blog post.
When we got back, we chose historical topics to research. The topic I chose was the Hudson’s Bay Company. We did some research on our topics, and then we wrote opinion pieces about what we thought of our topics. I was quite proud of my opinion piece. Personally, I have a positive opinion on the HBC since it did so much for the founding of Canada and helped mould it into the country we know today. We then made three images, one a quote, one a drawn on image and the third was our choice. I was most proud of my drawn on image. I spent a lot of time working on it and it ended up turning out really well.
We ended this project by watching a movie titled “8th Fire”. It was about the oppression of the First Nations peoples in Canada. Wab Kinew, the host, was very knowledgeable as well. It was very eye-opening.
In conclusion, this was a really great project. Definitely my favourite so far this semester. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be and I had very high expectations coming into this project as well. I really hope we do more projects like this in the future.
That’s pretty much it! I hope you enjoyed all 728 words of this blog post and I’ll see you on the next one.
Bye!
-Dylan
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