For our most recent project in humanities, we have been working on refining our podcast skills through a new project focussed around certain groups of minorities in canada. Specifically, LGBTQ, Mentally disabled people, Physically disabled people, People of the Sikh faith, and Japanese people. Now you might be wondering why specifically we chose these groups, we choose these groups based off of the minorities that we showed the most interest in through our first assignment, which was to write down some minorities in Canada and why we were interested in them.

For this podcast project, I was put in the Mentally disabled minority group with Luca J and Morgan. I was confident that this would be a solid group for this project. It was also based off of a minority that I showed interest in. The first thing we did was create a google doc to figure out our roles and to pool all of our research in.

I personally prefer google docs over Pages because of the fact that it is much more reliable and updates each document much faster in real time. The main roles I chose for this project was to gather research on the history of mental health in Canada I was also chosen to be the one to fully assemble and edit our entire podcast, including creating intro and outdo music.

The first thing I did was work on the intro/outro music, I wanted the music to be uplifting but not too happy because we would be talking about a pretty sensitive topic. After I was done with the music (which didn’t take me that long) I got to work on adding to the google doc. One of the main sites I use when researching is obviously Wikipedia, but for this project I ended up using other more insightful sites like mental health canada because I wasn’t able to find anything on Wikipedia about the history of mental health in canada.

During our research process I realized that there is actually way more people struggling with mental health problems than I originally thought. I used to struggle with severe anxiety attacks and it was really comforting to see that I am not alone. Once we had gathered enough content in our google doc we each turned our research into a script which we would then record and insert into our podcast. The project also had to include at least one interview of someone that fit into our minority, since I was already tied up with editing the clips we had already recorded, I let Luca and Morgan handle the interview process. They ended up interviewing Maia, who struggles with depression, attends seycove and is in the same grade as us.

The interview went really well according to what my teammates had communicated. For the podcast we also included a 5 minute long discussion of us just speaking our minds about mental health in canada and how well we thought the government and school systems have been treating people with them. We had finally acquired all of the content to form our podcast, we submitted our first draft and after receiving some critique we made some revisions (More music, smoother transitions, taking clips out, putting new clips in). After we had fully finished our podcast we uploaded it to soundcloud.

 

The last thing left for us to do was to email the podcast to our interviewee, Maia, and now here we are! Writing this blog post! After struggling with anxiety for half a decade, it was very surreal to find that millions of people around the world struggle with the same thing as me. I am very thankful to Ms. Maxwell for assigning us this project and I am excited to find out what is in store for the rest of the year.