For the past few months in humanities we’ve been learning all about Canadian history from the rebellions of 1837 to confederation in 1867. In this post I will be explaining a bit of our unit and our project.

Confederation, what is it?

Before the land above the United States became Canada, it was full of small colonies such as Newfoundland, Rupert’s Land, Montreal and so on. One day, a politician with the name of John A. Macdonald had the bright idea of uniting all of the small British North American countries and becoming one big country, so that the United States would have a smaller chance of attacking. But of course, it was easier said than done. He proposed his idea to George-Étienne Cartier, George Brown and the rest of the council, they all had different opinions on it but they ended up agreeing.

John and his men sailed around British North America to get the colonies to sign the proclamation to unite British North America. In 1867, when John was proposing his idea to the colonies, his persuasive skills only worked on 4 colonies right away, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec. Later on the rest of the provinces joined confederation. And on July, 1st 1867 Canada was born.

 

How did I learn this?

In class we did multiple different assignments to learn all about the creation of our country but these are the ones that stood outta me.

The first one I think of that taught me a lot was an exercise we did as a class. We were all assigned different colonies, I was assigned Prince Edward Island, and we read about the political and economic factors of our colony and then together came up with demands in order to join confederation. Then we later on presented our demands to the class such as how many seats we wanted, what Canada needed to include and what the capital should be.

This exercise really helped me understand how much negotiation it took to make Canada the way we know it today.

 

 

 

 

 

Another assignment we did was creating notes explaining confederation as a whole. I don’t know if this small assignment helped anyone else but I liked it because it gave me more of an idea of confederation as a historic event instead of just a bunch of little events that didn’t seem to connect in any way.

 

Heritage Minutes

In early January our class began to watch these videos called heritage minutes, which is basically a series on YouTube created by Historica Canada so show different Canadian stories on 60 seconds. In class we watched them and took notes on filming techniques and story writing.

 

How did we show our learning?

After watching multiple heritage minutes, guess what? We made our own!
My group for the project consisted of Maggie and Melanie and our topic was arts and culture.
As we researched our topic, the culture part strayed off to education and medical, we thought hmmm any interesting diseases? Break through research? Ah, Emily Stowe, the first female doctor in Canada, it was perfect.

After our research was completed by using both websites and textbooks we began to write out our script and draw our storyboard. Since this video could only be one minute these steps were a lot less time consuming compared to previous projects.

 

Then it was time to film. The first time my group tried filming was a total flunk, I’m not even going to get into it but it was pretty sad. The second go at filming went A LOT better, our settings were more accurate our lines were clearer and most importantly, Emily Stowes story was told. Before I say anything else, here it is.

In case you didn’t interpret the story completely through the video, Emily Stowe was a school teacher and mother who’s husband was diagnosed with tuberculosis, this inspired her to study medicine. When she applied to Victoria College she was immediately rejected because of her gender, she then travelled to the United States to start her medical education. Once she returned to Canada, she healed her husband and began to work as a doctor illegally until Canadian colleges finally allowed women, then she finally got her Canadian license and opened up her own clinic right next to her husbands dental clinic. She persued her career as a doctor until her death on April, 30. 1903.

 

The good and the bad:

This is a short reflection on the outcome of this project.

Pros:

-storyboard and script were planned out well and we had a clear idea of what we wanted the video to look like

-our settings throughout the video were planned well

Cons:

-we didn’t tell Emily’s story as deeply as we could’ve

-we didn’t go as beyond the school for filming as I wished we would’ve

-we had such a clear idea in our heads but we didn’t portray it in the video very well

 

Overall this project and history unit were both very educational and my interest in Canadian history is growing more and more.