In my humanities class, we have started a new unit called Sins of the City. The project that my class was assigned was a podcast that informed its viewers about an important topic that  involves Canada through the interwar period to now.

This unit started off with a field trip which was a pretty awesome way to introduce a topic. At the Museum of Vancouver, my class was supposed to take notes on the different subjects in the City on Edge exhibit. Some of these subjects were women’s rights, aboriginal rights, immigration, and more. In the end, I was given the topic of immigration and my group members were Claire, Reid, and Spencer.

For this project, my group decided to focus on the laws of immigration and treatment of immigrants through the interwar period to now. This topic is important to my group because we read an article about a ship that wasn’t allowed to enter Canada because the passengers were Jewish. These immigrants wanted a safe place to live that was away from Hitler, but were denied because of their appearances and religions. This sparked all of our interests because we wanted to learn more about who was, and more importantly wasn’t, allowed in Canada over time.

When we were told that we needed at least one interview in our podcast, I instantly knew that I could help my group out. My dad works with officers, and one of them knew a border immigration officer named Alex. Alex was a great person to interview because she told us all about why people can be denied access to living Canada today. On top of this interview I also got an interview with my aunt, Ann- Marie. She has witnessed the immigration process twice in the last 10 years when she was adopting her two children from Africa. These two interviews worked very well together in our podcast because we had one from someone who deals with immigration almost everyday, and one who has been on the other side of that immigration process. This was a good thing because we found out what kinds of things Canada still has to work on. There is always room to improve, but my group just needed to learn what those things are.

After recording my interview with both of the interviewees, I sent them an email that included the link to our project. My group asked the interviewees to give us feedback on our work, and both of them gave us very nice emails. In these emails, they said “the podcast sounds great!” And “I actually learned a lot about Canadain Immigration from the podcast”. This feedback was good for my group to hear because we wanted to make sure that the two interviewees felt comfortable with this way that we edited the interviews. They were more than pleased with our work, which made my group confident with the content we used in our podcast.

My group made multiple drafts of our podcast after being critiqued by peers, interviewees, and teachers. These drafts help us remember how far we’ve come while making the podcast, making us proud of our work.

My group made one final draft that included all of the revisions we made over this unit. We made multiple changes; including the music layout, evenness of audio, and the overall quality of the video. Here is our final draft of our Sins of the City: Immigration Podcast.

While making this podcast, we were supposed to take pictures and videos of what we did to show our groups work. This separate video was called “Behing the Podcast” and it featured all of my group members as we went on a field trip, did research, got feedback, and more. This video was very important to the project because it showed our understanding of this project and showed that we had fun while doing it! There were some things that we didn’t get the chance to take pictures of, including the phone call with our interviewees and the two times that we went to my house to record. Other than those aspects, the video that I made to show behind the scenes to our podcast is entertaining.

In the podcast process, all of the groups in my class were assigned a book that related to their topic. My group, being immigration, was given a book called War Child. This book was extremely intense and morbid, containing chapters about war, death, racism, rape, canabalism, and more. Although this was a hard book to read, it had great lessons inside the text and it gave me a bit of insight towards other cultures. This book really tied into the topic of this unit, to explore different cultures and see how they experienced the same events. This was done in the book by showing African citizens that had to go through war, compared to English and American citizens that were so rich that they could go to Africa and donate money and supplies to poorer towns.

While making our podcast and reading our book, there were mini projects that we worked on that helped us understand what life was like for different people in this time period. One of these projects was to find the percentage of different statistics.

Another mini project that my class worked on was the Namesake Video. This project was meant to get us to research places in Vancouver that we didn’t know the history of. My partner was Claire and we chose Gastown because we didn’t know how it got that unique name.

After making our podcast, we were given a new assignment in the same groups. The assignment was to make a letter that we could send to our MP, Terry Beech, that talks about a social injustice that is taking place today in Vancouver. My group, obviously, had to right our letter on immigration. This was a relatively easy topic because there is a surprising amount of problems that we have today on this topic. Once I handed in my letter, I was given feedback from my teacher that was really helpful.

After every member of my group wrote an individual letter, we were told to put our ideas together to creat one strong letter that contained everyone’s ideas. This didn’t sound like it would be a difficult task, but trust me, it was. Even though all four of us were writing about the same subject, we all had very different perspectives on how Mr. Beech should fix the problem. In the end, my group worked very hard to produce a letter that incorporated all of the best parts of our essays.

In the end, I have learned so much about the different perspectives of people who lived through the interwar period. I also learned an extensive amount of information about immigration which has sparked my interest in this topic. I’m very proud of my work from this unit, especially my Behind the Scenes Video because I worked very hard to do this for my group. I think that my group will get a high mark for our podcast because we created a high quality video and worked very well as a team.

Bibliography:

Emmanuel Jal (Author),‎ Megan Lloyd Davies . “War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story: Emmanuel Jal, Megan Lloyd Davies: 9780312602970: Books.” – Amazon.ca, www.amazon.ca/War-Child-Soldiers-Story/dp/0312602979.

“Canada Turned Away Jewish Refugees.” The Chronicle Herald, 16 Nov. 2015, thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1174272-canada-turned-away-jewish-refugees.

“Terry Beech.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Dec. 2017, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Beech.

“Home | Museum of Vancouver.” Home | Museum of Vancouver, 1 Jan. 1970, www.museumofvancouver.ca/.