Hold Your Head High
“You are valid, you are loved, and that’s just the truth. Be proud of yourself and who you are”
It starts with a microphone and ends with a message.
In our most recent humanities project we have been using audio to share our newly learnt knowledge of minorities within Canada.
[THE JADE PEONY]
We started the unit learning about the lives of Chinese Canadians through reading the book The Jade Peony, which follows the lives of three siblings as they grow up in Chinatown, Vancouver, in the 1930’s.
From reading the book, I learnt about the common cultural expectations and traditions that took place in the life of the Chinese Canadians in the 1930’s. I learnt about some mythology, culture; age, gender, and sexuality roles, and racial pressures that were put on the kids of Chinatown residents.
The Sounds Of Chinatown—
Our class went on a field trip to Vancouvers China Town, where the book takes place, to learn more about the areas history. While we were there, we all created a small podcast called “The Sounds Of Chinatown”, where we recorded the sounds of modern-day Chinatown and talked connected it to our lives.
[THE LITERATURE]
To begin:
What is literature?
It’s reading and writing. In this project we did a lot of that, and we did it about ourselves. It’s hard for us to talk about ourselves sometimes, but that’s okay because we didn’t have to say it, we wrote it.
For this part of the project we did a lot of writing prompts, such as;
-Age
-Gender
-Location
Using these prompts, we would write about how our age, location, and gender have affected our lives and how we see things (worldview).
It was all adding up to something big. An in-class essay on how OUR lives have affected OUR experiences with literature. It was a big essay on us. While that sounds easy- we should know all about us, it was actually quite hard to find things that were significant enough to put into the essay.
In the end I wrote a 1,590 word essay on myself and how my life has affected my experiences with literature, including examples from The Jade Peony to back up my points and examples.
I’m not going to include the whole essay, as it has a part in it that I would prefer not to be on the internet for the world to see, but this is the first page, and the conclusion.
[TO BE LGBT+]
As soon as I was told we were doing a project on minorities I knew exactly which one I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to get to look deeper into the struggles of LGBTQIA+ people who live in Canada. Canada is a pretty inclusive country, so I thought that it would be interesting to see what obstacles there still are that need to be removed so that LGBT people can feel just as safe and included as anyone else.
My group (Jessie, Kai, Alivia, and I), decided to look even deeper into minorities for our podcast and look solely at the struggles of Bisexual, Pansexual, and Asexual peoples within the LGBTQIA+ community.
We researched all about LGBT Canadian History, looked at Bi, Pan, and Ace representation in media, talked about how far we’ve come, and how far we need to go, in our podcast Forget The Boxes .
There is not a lot of representation of bi, pan, and ace representation television, with most representation put towards having plainly gay or straight characters. Even with the representation that does exist, it is often found that writers will kill off or end LGBT relationships and characters, and finding some of the more excluded specialities s very difficult. It’s hard to learn about these smaller sexualities when people mostly ignore them in the mainstream media that people look at, and so they are ignored or forgotten, and we wanted to shed some light on what it’s like to be one of those people, a minority in a minority.
[NEW KNOWLEDGE]
I learnt a lot from this project about looking at how my life and experiences feed into the way that I experience the rest of my life. I look at the world from the view of myself and all the parts of me that have grown over the years and that is intriguing to me. I never would’ve thought to look deeper into that and into myself to see what about me makes me who I am and how I experience things.
Something my group learnt though from this project in a technical sense is that we need to work on finding a good round-table-recording-system that works well and has good, even, and loud enough quality. We has a bit of difficulty with that this time around and that’s okay, it’s a learning experience! Next time we will find a better recording system and test it to make sure it is effective!
[BACK TO THE OLD DAYS]
Thanks for reading all about my most recent humanities project on minorities in Canada!
Next in Humanities: Unforgettable Experiences
[BONUS]
A feel good song about being your own hero, and being proud of yourself: Princess by Fletcher