When this unit was introduced to us by our teacher, I was really excited. The projects in this unit sounded extremely interesting, and personally I felt connected too. The driving question for this unit is, “How has the Canadian experience been different for minorities.” I think that a driving question the connects directly into real life, really helps spark an interest in learners.
The first real milestone in this project was the Chinatown podcast. The project entailed a trip Chinatown where we needed to be sure to take lots of pictures and video clips as you usually do on field trips. More importantly though, and to practice our podcast skills we needed to record the sounds of Chinatown. An example of this would be, cars, busses, people playing mah-jong. Overall, we needed to create a short 1-3 minute podcast reflection of our field trip.
In Chinatown, we went on a guided tour to learn more about the history, and minority of Chinese Canadians. I was really excited, because even though I only live thirty minutes away, I have never really learned about its heritage, and significants to the Chinese community. Our tour guide, Judy Maxwell, was extremely qualified because of her intense background knowledge of chinatowns across the world. We were lucky enough to go inside the Chin society, and the Wong’s benevolent association. This gave us insight on what some of the early days in china town might have looked like.
I ended up learning a fair amount more than I expected, though fact stands out to me. What surprised me the most, was the separation it had from vancouver. Even though, Chinatown is surrounded by the city, it had its own protection, and separate associations and societies that in some ways acted as a government. In the early to mid 1900 the Chinese were pretty much segregated from others, not by choice. Overall this trip has shown a new light on the unjust actions that the BC government and its citizens brought against The Chinese Canadians in chinatown.
For the English side of this project, we completed many different writing prompts, and wrote a Positionality Paper on The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy. The Jade Peony, is a story about a Chinese family immigrating to Vancouver, Canada. It switches perspectives throughout the story, providing the reader with an in-depth understanding of gender, and racial tensions in the mid-nineteen hundreds. In my Positionality Paper I wrote about How do our positions impact our experiences with literature? Ultimately I came to the conclusion, that our positions on culture and education impact our experiences with literature, creating and ethical and empathetic response. If you want to read my paper I put the link down below.
Like I mentioned above, as a class, we completed many different writing prompts. One writing prompt that stood out to me was:
“WHAT IS IT THAT YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WILL NEVER FORGET ABOUT BEING THIS AGE, AND WHY HAVE ADULTS FORGOTTEN IT?”
Writing prompts like these really spark that creative nerve, because in this case I am able to really stretch my answer. When re-reading my answer to this question, I realized I had never really answered it. In some ways, I just poked fun at the question.
The final aspect of this project was the people’s podcast, or minority podcasts. The criteria for this project was to create a podcast that would be about fifteen minutes, in groups of three or four. We got to pitch with minority we wanted to do individually, by writing a project pitch directly to our teacher. Than our teacher put us into our groups and chose one common minority for each group. The next step of this project was planning. Our group was able to accomplish such an amazing podcast, because of all of this preparation. We started multiple 3-7 page google docs, and organized every little aspect. In the meantime we started to work on our podcast script. As a group, we wanted the podcast to less solo and more panel. In other words we didn’t want it to sound robotic. To create this effect we needed to record the podcast in the same area at the same time. Looking back at our final result I think that this part of our plan really preserved our podcast style.
For this podcast I contributed not only my musical talent, but also my writing and recording skills. In our script, I wrote the intro, as well as the historical analysis. The script required me to do extensive research into the topics of treating chronic pain, and its influence in the media. This part of the script had to set the mood for the rest of the podcast, so it was important that it was factually correct. I also created the music for the podcast, this includes the ambiance music.
I had to contribute many hours to this aspect of the project. It was important for me to match the mood of the podcast, while giving the editor plenty of music to work throughout the podcast. Some of the music I created for the podcast did not get included, because it didn’t match the podcast. I planed for this and created more music that was needed. In the creation of the music I used an ambient synth+lead synth to create a layered finished project.
I personally faulted in my creation of a few songs. I spent a lot of time on a few songs that were in the incorrect key, and could not be used. If I had picked a key that was more susceptible to the story we were telling, I could have used this time to make more songs. This was a great learning experience, because it taught me that you need to really set up GarageBand before starting to make music. In the future I will definitely spend this time correctly.
Looking back on this podcast, I realize that it is probably one of the strongest pieces of work we have ever created. I am very proud of this podcast and really enjoy how professional it sounds. I learned many different things from this project, but one thing that really stood out to me is how important it is to plan. Before this project I dived right into my work head first, but after this experience I realize that organization and preparation are a key to success. Check out my podcast below and leave a comment on what our group did well, and what (for next time) we could improve.