👩‍⚖️ The Haitian Revolution’s Effectiveness Court Trial

“Your Honour, the prosecution submits that the Haitian revolution was ineffective.”

For this project we put the effectiveness of the Haitian Revolution on trial for the PLP Winter Exhibition.

 

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How Might We As Legal Teams Determine the Effectiveness of a Revolution? 

I think that the video of our trial does an excellent job at answering this driving question, but to summarize, I think that we can determine the effectiveness of a revolution as a legal team by doing the following: researching and finding evidence from the revolution to support our arguments, working and communicating with your team, finding different perspectives from which to view the revolution and use convincing language to persuade the jury to vote in your favour.

 

We kicked off this project by doing a simulation titled “Nation X.” In this simulation there were four sectors, each with a different status, wealth and living conditions. There were daily newspapers that informed the people any changes, like taxes, prices or disease.

I won’t go in depth on the rules or this post will be a mile long, but you can learn more about Nation X here. I was placed in sector D with King Colton and Ben T. We were the royalty and had a lot more benefits than the other sectors. Colton made some attempts to make life more fair, but overall the people thought he was not doing a good enough job and lacked motivation to take care of them. Because of this, I began secretly planning with several sectors, mainly sector B to overthrow Colton. I’m not sure how, but someone convinced Colton to officially appoint me as king. In my new position of ultimate power, I consulted with representatives from the other sectors with the help of my assistant, Dana. We came up with some first steps to make life more fair and functional, but for some reason I cannot fathom, many of my classmates (most of the boys) decided that they didn’t like the new rules and raided the capital forcing me and my supporters to the other side of the classroom. A wall was constructed between in the middle of the class with me and my supporters on one side, and almost all the rebels on the other. We decided to call our side of the classroom Nation Z, we then made some rules that everyone on the Nation Z side agreed with, while the Nation X side was a complete anarchy. Ms. Maxwell then ended the simulation before anyone got injured due to the aggressive nature of the people on the Nation X side of the classroom. We later wrote a refection on the experience of the Nation X/Z simulation, which you can read below:

We then learned about something called the Crane Brinton Theory. This theory is that revolutions are similar to disease. Diseases start by incubating, then reaches a moderate stage when you start feeling symptoms, followed by the crisis stage during which you feel the most awful, then finally the recovery stage kicks in and you start to return to normal. We made diagrams to show the stages of the Crane Brinton Theory, including what happens in each stage. I used Procreate to design a mountain style diagram. I’m really proud of how it turned out:

We also read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which is a story about how animals over through their owners and run the farm themselves. Animal Farm is an allegory for the Russian Revolution. We also watched the movie, which you can watch free here, but be warned that viewer discretion is advised… let’s just say there’s some very blubbery, sweaty pigs that may induce nausea or other uncomfortable sensations. 

After reading Animal Farm , we wrote a multi-paragraph response connecting it to the Crane Brinton Theory, which I think I was proficient at, although I could have connected to the Russian Revolution as well for a higher level of accomplishment. 

We then began the process of learning about the revolutions we choose/got assigned to. I got assigned to the Haitian Revolution, which was my first choice. On my team was Alfie, Faith, Julian and Luca. I found this video particularly helpful to learn about the Haitian Revolution:

We made graphic organizers with information about our revolution. I think that this diagram was vital to my ability to find continuity and change for the Haitian Revolution. I am particularly proud of the artificial Instagram profiles I made for the main people involved.

Then we found primary and secondary sources with evidence for why the Haitian revolution was effective and organized it into something called an affidavit (an affidavit is a written statement confirmed by oath or affirmation, for use as evidence in court.) If you like, you may see our affidavit here.

We then worked with the other team to create a script for our mock trial. Click here to see the steps we took to make our script. Our team quickly realized that we had a very slim chance of wining the trial, and we realized that if we focused on after the revolution we could win, so we made a bunch of changes to the script… and we kinda, maybe, definitely forgot to tell the other team about our idea to do this and we also were not aware that we weren’t aloud to do so. Understandably they were NOT pleased. We worked out a plan to work together to form a script with evidence and augments so that the trial could go either way. We spent a full day on revisions (got to school an hour early, worked on it during lunch, and after school) and were able to create a script that worked for both of us. You may read our script here if you so desire. Then we did our best to memorize our lines in the short 24 hours we had till show time. I’m really happy and proud of how our team and the opposing team worked together to give us an both an equal chance of wining.

Showtime! I think the trial went really well and our team won!

If you didn’t watch the trial at the top of this post, make sure to watch it now:

We also got a short amount of time to go see some of the other grade’s exhibitions, I wish I had gotten more time, but I really enjoyed seeing the grade 8’s tableau performances based on the book outsiders and a bit of the grade 10’s war memorial monument ideas. Make sure to read some of their blogs, check them out here! Also make sure to watch the other group’s trials:

I had a lot of fun with the trial and learned a lot about revolutions, like the four stages, effectiveness and ineffectiveness, as well as how legal trials work. I hope that we will get to do more fun simulations like Nation X and do more performances to showcase our learning in the future. That’s it for this post, make sure to check out my team and the other team’s blogs: Alfie, Faith, Julian, Luca, Teva, Nolan,Xander, Ewan and Gabi. 

Please let me know whether YOU think the Haitian Revolution was effective or ineffective in the comments below!

Thanks for reading and happy holidays! ⛄️