Alas, it’s the end of another unit, and close to the end of 2017.

For the most part, social studies has never been something I’ve been interested it. There’s the occasional history fact that catches my eye, or an assignment that I enjoy, but it’s rare that I’m as excited as I was for this unit.

Our unit this year was called Sins of the City, based off of this museum exhibit. So, we started this off my going to that exhibit. Social justice is something that’s always interested me, so this was really cool to see how it progressed throughout the ages. One part of the sumeum had the history of Canada, from when the First Nations were the only on here to about the 60’s. I think one of my favourite parts about that section was the cool car they had in the 50’s area:

I really like vintage cars.

Anyways, we then carried on into the social justice area, the Sins of the City. It covered everything, from women’s rights, to labour rights, to LGBTQ+, First Nations, immigrants, and everything in between. We had to focus on an issue in the interwar years (1919-1939).

I found a few things that interested me. Women’s rights infind very interesting, because it’s suck a broad topic that you can get lost in research for hours. LGBTQ+ rights hits home for me, as a member of the community. I found this story on the wall, that I had originally wanted to base my project around:

Another part I really liked was the graffiti stairs. They had chalk, and you could simply write whatever you wanted on it. There were some powerful messages on there, and it really showed what Vancouver valued, from sayings such as ‘love is love’, to ‘womens rights’, and more.

This picture above is just something that wound up happening. How? I honestly don’t know.

There was so much more to the exhibit, but that would take a while to write. So, moving on. When we got back, we had to pick three things we wanted to do our project on. My choices wound up being LGBTQ+ rights (wow, what a shocker), Women’s rights, and Immigration rights.

I was put in the Human Rights group, with Hannah, Isobel and Robbie

At first, we wanted to do a podcast on Women’s voting rights. Though, it just wasn’t a strong enough idea, we couldn’t think of enough. So we went deeper. Possibly women portrayed in the media? No. Women in comic books? As much as I liked that idea, we couldn’t find anything.

I guess you could say we were in a bit of a jam

But then, it dawned upon us. Well, it dawned upon Isobel, but this is a group project so we’re all gonna take credit for it. We were going to talk about Homelessness. Currently, in Marpole, there’s a homeless shelter being built across the street from an elementary school. Obviously, there’s a bit of controversy about that. And in the Great Depression, so many people were homeless. So we had found our topic, at last.

Then we had to tackle it. Here’s the project: create a 5-7 minute podcast highlighting the topic chosen (in our case, homelessness). Find a story from today, and relate it back to the interwar years. Everyone needs to talk, and there should be interviews.

And we were off. We started off with a solid script, talking about the issue in Marpole, and then about the Great Depression, and we figured out who to interview. Our plan was to split up scripted bits with us having an unscripted discussion. When he headed over to Robbie’s house to record…. our discussion was 8 minutes long. So, we changed it. We had a small scripted intro, and then it went into the discussion. Our discussion was so strong, that it covered everything we said in the scripted bits, but it was just better. So we kept it, and scrapped the script.

This turned out for the better, in my opinion, because it made our podcast stronger. There wasn’t a sheet of paper telling us what to do, it was just our opinions on the matter.

Hannah got an interview with a lady called Tannis, who works with homeless people all the time. She was really nice and helpful.

So, we handed in our first draft of the podcast. I wasn’t there when the critique was given, but I saw it in showbie. I took on the editing for draft two, tweaking things like audio and adding in more things.

Draft three was pretty much the final thing, just a few more audio adjustments and we were good!

Then, we had to send in to our interviewee, Tannis. Her email response is shown below:

And that was it…. almost. We had one more thing to do: write an essay. We did this last year, though this time it was different. We were originally going to do reading responses to books we had read in class (my group read The Bite Of The Mango, a really good book), but then the assignment changed. We were going to write a letter, to Terry Beech, our member of parliament. My essay tackled the topic that the public isn’t informed on homelessness. I proposed an ad campaign, to help raise awareness for homeless people and what they’re going through.

We wrote those essays, and then our group combined it into one letter to send:

And that was the final touch to this unit! All in all, I really enjoyed it. It was interesting to learn about homelessness, which I didn’t know much about. I hope to do more projects like this in the future!

If you’d like, here’s a small recap video of the unit, including some embarassing videos of me eating a muffin:

Read You Later

Sincerey, Me