Over the past few weeks in my Socials class, we have been discussing social issues in our city, Vancouver. These include environmental issues, human rights, city development, labor rights, Aboriginal rights, and immigration.

We stared off by creating a non-fiction book club. Our class was divided into groups that each read a nonfiction book that they discussed every Wednesday for four weeks. My group read ”Persepolis, A Story Of Childhood”. I actually found it to be a really interesting book. It was about a young girl’s life in Iran in the 1980’s. In the book the character, Persepolis,  works to understand why the revolution in Iran is occurring and what her place is, in it.

My group finished our book two weeks early so we dicided to read another one within the remaining time. Our teacher gave us an interesting book called ”The Bite Of The Mango” which is about an African girl’s life after her village is destroyed by rebels. These rebels caught her and  cut off her hands.

After we discussed our books,  we created a reading response log about our feelings, thoughts, reactions, and questions about situations, ideas, actions, characters, settings, symbols, plots, themes, and any other elements in the stories we read. Below are the responses I wrote:

To continue our learning on social issues, we went on a field trip to the Museum of Vancouver (MOV). The goal of this visit was to learn more about the social issues facing the City of Vancouver, to identify issues that we found interesting,  make notes on them and then use the notes in an assignment. I found that issues that focused on human rights were the most interesting. Because of this, I was assigned to the human rights project group. This group included myself, Ruby, Hannah and Isobel.

Our project focused on the task of creating an informative podcast about a social injustice that has been going on since the interwar years. The project needed to include interviews, information about the topic, and be based around an event in Vancouver that focused on our topic. Because human rights is a large, broad topic , we had to narrow it down. My group and I decided to base our project on the rights of the homeless.

The story we chose was about a homeless shelter being built in Marpole Vancouver , which is located on the edge of South Vancouver. In Marpole they planned to build a 78 unit shelter across the street from both Dogwood Lodge Senior Centre and Sir Wilfred Laurier Elementary School. Many families were very worried about a shelter being opened near their children’s school and many  protested against the building of the shelter. They were worries that their children would be in danger of coming into contact with drug needles and other dangerous materials showing up around the community, as a result of the shelter.

I, personally, agree with the families and their concerns. I think that the shelter, being so close to the school, would expose the children to too many risks and that it should not be necessary to open a shelter so close to an elementary school. The rest of my group, however, disagreed. They believed that the shelter should opened in this location and was worth the risk. This conflict, our disagreement, actually ended up helping my group. This is because we where able to have a debate integrated into our podcast which I personally found gave it a unique aspect compared to the other groups’ projects.

We went through a lot of drafts in finishing this project. Each draft made our podcast better and better. One of our main methods of critique was to gain feedback from our peers.

For one of our critiques, our teacher had our group show another group our podcast. The members of the group that saw our podcast then gave us feedback. Here’s what they said:

Below are our drafts and final product:

Draft 1:

draft 2:

Final Product:

This podcast lead to the final project in our unit; A letter to our MP (Member of Parliament) to bring the issue, highlighted in our podcast, to their attention. We created the letter by first writing our own essays about a problem relating to the issue we’d like to change.

We then created one, new essay by compiling all the best points in our individual essays . I’m actually quite happy with how this new essay turned out, especially since the thesis and information we used was influenced by my original essay.

 

While our individual essays won’t be sent to our MP,  the jointly created one will be and I’m quite interested learn how our MP will respond.