A few weeks ago we visited the Museum Of Vancouver (MOV). It was tons of fun to look at the history of Vancouver, but that wasn’t why we were there. The real reasons we went to MOV was to choose a topic for our podcast we would create down the road! As we walked throughout the museum we had to identify each section or theme (environmental, aboriginal rights, housing, immigration, and human rights). Then with those themes we were told to choose one, so they could group all students for the project. Overall going to the MOV was really fun and deepened my knowledge of Vancouver by showing me the effects of historical events. At the end of this post there will be a video of the visit to MOV and project!

Throughout this unit we also had to complete and learn about various lessons. Most were about the historic events of Vancouver but some were about the current human rights. My favourite assignment we did was the Namesake one, you can read about it here. We also learned all about the 20s and how they were all about having fun. Since we just learned about the tragic events that took place during WWI, it was nice to see a positive change like the 20s in history. I think the most interesting thing we learned about were the population and immigration count during the early 1900s. For this task we had to create an info graphic for either 1911, 1921, and 1931 using a chart filled with information. This information was filled with the gender population, immigrant population for each separate country, legal and illegal immigrants, Canadian born citizen, the list goes on. Our job was to essentially unclutter that information by using an info graphic, here’s mine on 1911!

In the end we shared with our class the stats from each year. It was really interesting to see the change throughout time and what went up and down. For example the population of Asian immigrants actually went up thought the years!

Along with this whole unit, we also read a book specified to our theme. Our book was called The Right To Be Cold, it was a bibliography about a woman called Sheila Watt-Cloutier. She talked about her journey as an Inuit woman and her path to a successful career. Along with this book we completed 4 reading responses. Each response had to be reflective, they could vary anywhere from how you liked the book, to connections in your real world. Here’s all four of mine, starting with the first and ending with the fourth!

All the stuff I just talked about did eventually lead into podcasts that we would create! These podcasts were centred around the idea of the “Sins of the City”. Each group got a theme for example, environment, city growth, aboriginal rights and immigration. My group ended up getting the theme of environment.

As I said before the podcast had to be centred around “Sins of the City”. What this basically means is the mistakes that the city had made in the past, specifically the inter-war years. Our group was environment which meant we were going to be focusing on the oil aspect of everything, this also meant that relating everything back to the inter-war years was going to be difficult. This was going to be challenging because the revolution of the oil industry didn’t really begin until a little later in the 1900s. In the end we focused it on the building of the Vancouver oil refinery then led everything else into the Kinder Morgan pipeline and the ambleside oil spill of 1973.

Eventually when we figured out the main story outline of our podcast we wanted to choose a theme (e.g. expert interviewer, round table, multi-host). In the end we decided to go for a type of round table/debate type of thing. Once every part of our podcast was mapped out we moved onto the next step of making this podcast… finding & interviewing experts. We decided to contact a local awareness group and get together to get as much information and advice on the Kinder Morgan Pipeline and transportation system as possible. Somebody in our group was good friends with the head of the group, so we ended up just going to her house and having a conversation on the topic. We learned about all the dangers of the oils they are using and the spills that have happened over the years including the ambleside oil spill. When we went to the interview it was pretty relaxed, we just had to prepare some questions, and we were good to go!

Once we finished our first draft of our script it was time to get it critiqued! I will add a before and after picture of the script down below (first picture is before and second is after)

So as you can tell we got quite a lot of critique. Overall the whole thing was way too vague and needed some research and structure. Our whole group decided that it would be a good idea to meet at Starbucks and just totally revise the whole thing. I was pretty happy with the draft 2 results so our group decided to move along with the process and start recording audio. A few people created the music in Garage Band and others edited it in iMovie and Ferrite as well as Garage Band, here’s how it turned out!

Like all things, the podcast needed to be revised. We found that since our podcast was a debate it threw everything off tracks because of the way it was recorded and broken up. This created an unnatural flow to the audio that we didn’t like. Another thing that quite a lot of people didn’t like was the music, it was way too repetitive and didn’t match the tone of the podcast. So a few days before it was due we decided to scrap the whole thing! We went back to square one and re-did the script. This time we decided to do a non-narrative story telling theme, we felt this would work well because it would create a more natural flow to our groups audio. Then we had to focus on the interview, we started cutting it up into different parts and splitting them up throughout the podcast. Next was the music, one of our group members liked creating music, so we just led that up to him. Once all components of the podcast was finished we created our final draft, here it is!

So once we were done we sent the podcast to our interviewee to critique. All she said in the end was that it looked and sounded good, so we didn’t have anything else to revise. The final part of this podcast was putting together a little montage of the process of creating the podcast. Throughout everything, we saved clips of us editing and creating the podcast so putting the video together was pretty easy, all we had to do was choose music. Here it is!

The final part of this whole unit was letting our topics be heard! We had to create a final essay stating how and what we wanted to do with our injustice (mine being Kinder Morgan health risks). We were given two classes to complete this essay, once we handed it in, it was critiqued and revised. Below will be my first draft then following with my revised version.

Finally each group condensed there 4 essays into one big letter. This letter would then be mailed off to our constituency’s MP, Terry Beech! This meant that our essays needed to be clear and concise, they needed to state what we wanted and why we wanted this. Here’s how it turned out!

So throughout this whole process I learned a lot. I improved my editing skills, and learned a lot more about the certain themes of podcast like ‘round table and multi-host’. I also improved some skills that I would some day need in a job, I learned how to professionally contact and get together with an outside source and follow through as-well! Throughout this, by far the most important thing I learned was the rights we have as citizens, the rights others had throughout time, and the difference between them. What I mean by this is how others that were unfairly treated throughout the 1900s and earlier experienced Vancouver differently. All this was very tragic but also showed how far Vancouver has come since then! Overall its safe to say, this was a pretty fun project that I learned a lot from!