Hello everybody and welcome back to the end of another unit. Just recently in PLP we finished up looking at the civil rights movement, throughout the 50s and 60s. In class we talked about the movement itself, and notable events that took place. Where as outside of class we were paired up and tasked with making a video about an individual changing a system, presumably relating back to Canada. I was paired up with Spencer, we decided to look at Jackie Robinson’s story and how it relates to Canada. Here is our video:

As I mentioned above my partner for this project was Spencer. The two of us are both very sporty and we both wanted to do a project on that topic. We both knew the story of Jackie Robinson and thought that it would be good to do our project on it. The only thing was, we had no idea how to connect him to Canada. That’s when Google cams in clutch. After a few minutes of research we found out that before playing for the Dodgers, Jackie had played with the Montreal Royals. Some other things that we thought were quite notable and weren’t super well understood around the world, was that Jackie wasn’t the best player in the Negro Leagues at the time. However he was a very solid player and he had faced major racism before. He had played integrated sports at university as well.

Over the course of the project both Spencer and I did lots of research as well as collaborating on the script. He then did the voice over while I put the video together. Overall I though we worked well together, we communicated well and produced a solid video.

Throughout the unit we learned about many different events over the course of the civil right movement. We talked about events such as the murder of Emmett Till, the Little Rock Nine, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, March on Washington, and many others.

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We read the novel titled Dear Martin, it was a book set in modern time about an African American teenager, who grew up in the hood, but went to an expensive and almost exclusively white school. Without spoiling anything the plot of the story ends up with him getting into legal matters, as well as finding love with a white female (which his mom disapproves of).

With this novel and films we would watch later on in the unit, we would have Socratic Seminars. These were meet ups where we would discuss our topic and try and find the deeper meaning of it, through connections or other research we had done.

Overall I feel like I learned a lot from this unit. This was a very big and important topic and I feel like I understand it well. I really enjoyed Dear Martin and it got me reading again. Also any unit that gives me a chance to look at baseball history is a good one in my books.