Hello! Welcome to today’s blog post. I’ve opted today to divide my podcast in a slightly different way. There will be four different categories.

Launch

Our latest project in humanities has been a short one but an interesting one. We have been doing (drumroll if you would like) podcasts? Yes, we’ve been doing podcasts. Our driving question for this podcast project was:

How did lives and conditions change and stay the same for Canadians after WWII?

To be more specific, we decided to focus on how lives and conditioned changed for Canadian minorities from 1945-1982 (oddly specific dates I know but there is a reason for that). We were put in groups, my partner was Fraser, and we had to choose a topic. We chose to focus on the LGBTQ+ community, here is our revamped driving question:

How have the experiences and rights LGBTQ+ Canadians changed since the end of WWII?

Before we go on and delve deeper, you can listen to our podcast here: Under the Gaydar

Throughout this entire project we focused on two main competencies:

Comprehend: What literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding?

Identify Continuity and Change: How are lives and conditions alike over time and how have they changed?

Building Knowledge

The first step in making our podcasts was to listen to podcasts and understand what made a good podcast. I listened to a TED talk podcast about marine conservation it was really really fascinating, you can listen to it here. The biggest thing I learnt by listening to this was the cadence in which the presenter spoke, it was an informational podcast episode and wasn’t trying to be poppy or quirky it was trying to deliver the information in an impactful and clear manner.

The second step was to understand a thing or two about minorities. Ms. Maxwell (our teacher) is a fan of book chats and well, books by extent. So to understand the story of someone who was a minority and how we could talk about these stories and make inferences we read:

“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”

I can’t even begin to describe this story without going into a whole speech about it because I just loved it so much! But in short the book is about a boy named Junior who is Native American and lives on a reservation (the Spokane reservation to be exact), Junior is really smart and decides to go to a different school which is farther away from his rez. The whole book is really about his struggle trying to fit into his new primarily white school and trying to still be a part of the rez. It’s a really good read but does deal with some graphic/hard to read material.

The third step in building our knowledge about minority groups was to watch this documentary called the “8th Fire: Indigenous in the City”. You can watch it below, it’s really good actually. I have attached it below so that you can watch it:

 

I had to write a written reflection on how the 8th fire and the Absolutely True Diary we’re connected and how those stories could help us understand issues that minorities face. I have also attached that here.

The 4th and final step was to do some research on our topic. Two of the topics I stumbled upon during my research about the LGBTQ+ communities history in Canada was The George Everett Klippert Case and Operation Soap. You can watch videos on both of those below. An overall comprehensive article about LGBTQ+ history in Canada can be found here.

Develop and Critique

This is the part of the project where we started to assemble things like our research, our script, our interview questions, well first we had to find someone to interview, etc. We were using garage band to make our podcasts.

Our interview. Unfortunately I was unable to complete our interview due to illness. But Fraser did it. The person we were interviewing was his uncle, Joel Gook, who was really a terrific source. Big thank you to Joel.

The final step was to assemble all of our collected sound, and make some music and an intro. We already had a little jingle but we put in some music at the end and a little break in the middle.

Present and Reflect

We didn’t do much in the way of presentation we mostly just posted our podcast, which we did as you probably know. In terms of reflection here’s what I have to say:

I am really super proud of this podcast. We got so much done and learnt so much in such a short amount of time. If there’s anything I would change I would actually want to make it longer, there’s so much more information about this topic than I can cover. I used the core competencies of comprehension to understand the Absolutely True Diary and to understand the research that we did to understand the history of the LGBTQ+ community. I used the core competency of identifying continuity and change to analyze the historical facts we learnt about both in regard to general history and the more specific things we learnt about to learn more about our podcast topic.

Well that’s it for today! I hope you learnt something and I’m sure I’ll see you soon with another post.