🏙/🌃 How it started/How it’s going

Hello!

In this post I am going to be writing about our most recent project, titled “How It Started / How It’s Going” after the popular meme:

Source

Our end product was a virtual museum containing our how it started/how it’s going meme which contained art from the medieval or Renaissance eras. I hope you enjoy!

What can we learn from the past, and why does that matter to us today?

I think that learning about the past helps us have more awareness and possibly appreciation of today’s systems. For example, in the medieval era there was feudalism, a social ranking system. You were born into your social rank and could never move up or down. The lower ranked people were treated with less respect and kindness. Women did not have the same opportunities as men did. I think that learning about this has made me appreciate our current system of (mostly) equal rights. I also think that learning about the past can teach us that things can change. For example, in the Renaissance era the ranking system began to deteriorate. Previously, in the medieval era, people’s lives were shaped around Christianity, they worked hard so that they could go to heaven after death. In the Renaissance, university thinkers began to think that people could improve their lives. People began to start studying humanities, which included philosophy, history, poetry and grammar. They moved away from doing everything for the church. The low ranked people were able to make money by working in the trades and escape from poverty. This has taught me that things and ways of life can change. This could apply to climate change: if people in the Renaissance era changed the way of life, maybe we too can change our way of life and laws to be environmentally friendly. This could also apply to equal rights. We can move beyond mostly equal rights to truly equal rights, like the current Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ+ movements are fighting for.

The first stepping stone towards understanding why learning about history matters, was learning about worldview. In the simplest terms, worldview is the “lens” that we see the world though. This metaphorical “lens” affects how you think, your opinions, how you speak and even how you dress! There are many different worldviews. The worldview that most of us in North America share is called a Western Worldview. Worldview is shaped out of seven different aspects: Beliefs, Geography, Knowledge, Society, Economy, Values, and Time. An example of a Value that we have is that everyone should be treated equally. The first step to explore our worldview was to create a mind map with the app MindNode. I found it difficult to think of three things to put in each category.

⬇️ Here is my MindNode ⬇️

Milestone 2 also helped me develop my understanding of my worldview. For Milestone 2 we made a collage that represented our worldview. I found it difficult to arrange the photos to tell a story, while still using everything we learned in our advertisement project about visual design, to make my collage aesthetically pleasing. I am proud of how I covered all of the faces in my collage with Memojis, to protect my privacy and to show the Empowered Learner competency. We wrote an argument to accompany our collages, then we put them into Book Creator and sent them to Ms. Maxwell, who combined them into a digital book.

 

I enjoyed seeing how all of my classmates made theirs and learning from other ideas for making collages in the future and how their worldviews were similar to or different from mine!

⬇️ Here is my worldview collage ⬇️

One of the methods that we learned to help us keep track of important points in history was a note taking method called Cornell Notes.

I found this method only worked when I had a written piece of text to take notes on. If it was an audio or a visual, I wasn’t able to focus on everything, so I was only able to get a few ideas down out of the many that were presented. I also had difficulties filling out the left column. But the notes did help me a bit for Milestone 3, which was a test on what we had learned so far.

Then we were divided into groups, one for each aspect of worldview. I was placed in the Values group with Gabi, Gwen, Hannah, Jocelyn, Max R, Kwosen and David. Each of us had a specific role in the group: Art Designer, Techie, Writer, Room Designer, Directly Responsible Individual [DRI] or flex member. I selected the Techie role.

Milestone 5 was the biggest milestone. For Milestone 5, we chose a piece of art that represented a western worldview Value. I chose The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, which was created in 1533 during the Renaissance era. Then we used SuperimposeX to edit in our faces and other objects that we felt represented our aspect of worldview. This was to create a version of the popular How It Started/How It’s Going meme. The original painting was the How It Started side and the edited version was the How It’s Going side.

⬇️ Here is the original and edited painting ⬇️

We also wrote an argument and a shortened Artist’s Statement about our art, which included why we chose the objects that we edited in. ⬇️Here is my argument⬇️

⬇️ Here is my artist’s statement ⬇️

Then we placed the art side by side in a frame that our group’s art designer, Jocelyn, chose.

⬇️ Here is my framed meme ⬇️

Then I took the design that Gwen made for our room in the museum, and instructed Ms. Willemse where to place the 3D objects in our room. I also helped to create our reason for having the 3D objects in our room. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to learn how to or get to use Artsteps (the software we used to create our museum) to create our room, and hope in the future I’ll have the opportunity to use this software.

The final part of this project was to have a live “launch” of our museum on Zoom. In a group with the techies (Julia, Judah, Nolan, Sylas, Sepaus and Noah) from other worldview aspect groups, we created a small script to present on Zoom about what we contributed and how we helped our teams to answer the driving question. Click here to read our script.

Each group got to have a common virtual background. I am proud of how our team combined multiple ideas to create this final background:

Then we all presented our roles on our Live Launch and the museum was opened to the world. Please have a visit!

⬇️ Here is what our aspect’s (values) room looks like ⬇️

⬇️ Here are some basic instructions on how to navigate it ⬇️

⬇️ Here is our museum (it’s embedded so you can visit right here on my blog!) ⬇️

Or visit on Artsteps here.

I really enjoyed learning about the medieval and Renaissance eras, and creating a virtual museum for the whole world to see! Feel free to let me know your thoughts on our museum or this post in the comments below! Thank you for reading.