Hello! Welcome back to another one of my fun blog posts!
In this blog post, you will listen to me talk about the process of creating an instagram post about an important event that occurred in history and relate it to the idea of nationalism. All of the topics we had to choose fro, were between the 1750’s and pre-WWI. Most of these were based in Canada, and I personally chose the confederation conferences, which happened in 1864.
This project was mostly independent and we only worked on it for around a month. My favourite part of this project was writing the factual, opinion based paragraph. Which was one of our final assignments for this project. I am happy with what I did as a learner for this project, along with obviously what I learned in this project.
To begin this project, we had to learn about what exactly “Nationalism” was. Specifically, Canadian nationalism. Nationalism can be defined with many examples but our main focus was having values in a nation that provided the nation with an identity from those values. To gain more knowledge on this, we created a “Canadian Check” video that gave us the creativity to present three Canadian stereotypes in video form, that is commonly used to identify us as a nation.
I think this particular beginning of the project was particularly helpful, as it gave us a general understanding on how stereotypes connect to identity, and how identity as a nation really helps to define nationalism.
Now on to a particularly fun part of our project!
The Rebellion scene!
To learn about Upper and Lower Canada, we had a digital simulation called “Rebellion Scene Investigation” which took us through both territories and gave us the opportunity to talk to the people in each territory to learn more about what is happening in Canada at the given time. I think that understanding historical perspectives was very important in this case. Due to the fact that to come to conclusions about Canada at the time, we needed to understand the perspective people had in the past.
In our last activity we participated in before going into our topics, we were in a “Confederation Simulation”. The simulation gave us a better understanding on the historical perspectives in the time of the Canadian Confederation of 1867 and how it came to be. In said simulation, we were split into six colonies: Canada East, Canada West, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. I was assigned to Canada East along with my group Teva, Carter, and Ben. This simulation took around two weeks. We first learned about our assigned topics, then created a preliminary proposal document that included our demands we wanted as a nation. Our proposal was finalized and presented in front of the class. By the end of the simulation, Mr. Harris presented the Confederation proposal to all of us, showing us what it would offer each to each colony. Luckily for us, ( Canada East) almost all of our requests were met in this confederation agreement, and with that, we agreed to join.
Now after all that, we can finally dig into our topics. It was pretty much first come first serve. Originally, I chose to focus on John A MacDonald, although my friend ines was alone in working on the Confederation Conferences, and I was alone on working on specifically John A MacDonald, so we joined forces, and later, claire joined in as well.
To begin with this, we handed in research we had done on our assigned topics so we could gain a better understanding on them before we started anything else! Next we had to begin working on a 100 words or less caption for our final product (the Instagram post)
After everyone in our group wrote individual captions, we finally came to a conclusion and combined ours to create our final caption! After our caption was formed, it was time to create our three images. Individually, we all created three images ( one being a drawn on image, another being an quote, and another being free choice!). Then, we all picked our favourites to present to our group and to become our final images!
And shortly I will upload the link to our instagram post!
All in all , this was an interesting project. I am happy with the topic I ended up choosing and I believe I did a great job at getting to know my topic well and working on my competencies and my group work skills. I am decently happy with what I learned throughout this project. Now ask yourself, ‘How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?’ Well, understanding the past of nationalism can allow us to make connections in history and better understand the events that lead up to the formation of our modern day society. To understand that identity is fluid, and can change over time. Nationalism is a deeply important concept, and I am happy I had the opportunity to gain a deeper knowledge on it!
Thank you for reading !!