Manifest Destiny

Hello welcome back to my blog! Today I will be talking about the Case For a Nation project. This was a pretty interesting project about Nationalism and I learned a lot about the concept Nationalism and how its different in different places. Which leads us to the driving question from this project. “How can an understanding of nationalism in the past, help us make sense of today?”. So to answer this we can understand nationalism in the past and it can help us make sense of today by explaining the pride from a country which was stemmed from religious views and how these patriotic values can evolved overtime.

To start off this project we did a fun Canadian Check video to show what people think of when they think of Canada. This was a fun quick group assignment and though it was a little rushed  because of the time limit, it still turned out pretty good. Next we dove right into understanding Nationalism and how we could connect it to today. To help us understand Nationalism and connect it to today we did a Current Events Presentation about any event we wanted that we could connect to Nationalism. To spread out the presentations we were given a random date to present, so my presentation date gave be about a week to prepare. I am very happy with how my current events presentation turned out because I spent lots of time researching and preparing for it.  

Then after we finished all the current events we moved onto learning more about Nationalism in British North America and did some group work to make sure we all had the same understanding. Then we eventually got to the main project topics. We got to pick our top 3 choices from a list with a bunch of different nationalisms. My first choice was American Nationalism/Manifest Destiny so that was the one I got. To be honest I didn’t know much about any of the topics but after learning about Manifest Destiny I was glad I chose that one because its actually really interesting. 

After getting my topic I started to research and learn about it. I am actually pretty happy with all the research I did. This helped me be prepared for the next class when we had to work on creating a storyboard/story mountain on your topic, then explain it to a group of people with different Nationalisms. I feel I had a very good understanding of American Nationalism and Manifest Destiny which was a big step into the right direction. The next step was to create a caption that was between 50-100 words. Because we did not have much space this meant I had to be very specific and only include what I felt were the more important facts/information. I think that my individual caption turned out well and helped me and my group (the other people doing Manifest Destiny) create the final caption. I think my group worked very well together on this because we included a big of everyone’s individual captions into the final one. Here is how it turned out. 

Then after this was to create 3 individual images to represent your topic. The first image had to be a drawn on photograph, the second image had to be a quote, and lastly the third was a choice so you could do whatever you wanted. After creating the individual images we worked with our topic groups and chose one of everyone’s images, we went with Alicia’s drawn on photograph, Cooper’s choice image, and my quote image. Then we started creating the opinion paragraph. I am happy with my opinion paragraph because I worked hard on it and I think it turned pretty good. When we were assigned this activity I was away so I was not exactly sure on what I was supposed to do but after a little big I figured it out. I personally feel like I just accomplished this activity rather then extend on it because when I was writing it I was rushing to get it done. Next time we have to do something like this I will carve out more time to get it done outside of school to make it less rushed. 

Overall I think this project was pretty interesting. My topic groups final product of this project turned out really good. I am super happy with how well our team worked together to get everything done and I like how we collaborated to make sure a bit of everyone’s work was included. Throughout the entire project I worked with multiple other groups along with the topic group which also helped me improve my teamwork and collaborating skills. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and also maybe even learned something. 

P.S – Here is our Manifest Destiny Instagram Post which includes our caption as well as our 3 final images.