Here I am again, a year later writing another blog post for my wonderful viewers. Today’s post is going to be a little bit of a throwback to last year in 2016 WOW! So long ago…… A little before the winter break my peers and I were tasked with creating a full immersive exhibition for the public. In the iTunes U course that Mr Hughes created, the title was labeled “Do you want to build an exhibition?” Which was referencing the movie Frozen if you didn’t catch on, I don’t think most of the class were impressed by the cheese coming from that joke. For the HPC students our main focus for the exhibition was Canada’s emerging identity around the World War One era, As Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes put it “Essentially, as visitors walk through the exhibition they should be getting a sense of how Canada’s identity emerged through the events you will be presenting”. The first step was to spilt the class up into five different groups, these groups consisted of,

1900s Pre-War Canada
1916 Trenches
1917 Conscription Crisis
1920s Post-War Canada
1930s The Depression

The second step was brain storming ideas, Ms Willemse, laid out five big pieces of paper with the themes that are shown shown up above written down and the idea was that class would go around to each paper and write down a key aspect for that theme. After all that malarkey the class was separated once more into groups. My group consisted of Gabi, Brianna, Stanfield, Jackson and me, we were challenged with creating the environment for Pre-War Canada in the exhibition. Now this was quite the complicated challenge, our job was to travel back more than a hundred years ago and recreate what Canada was like just before World War One started. Our plan of action was to recreate an immigration office, a street rally for a speech made by the Canadian prime minister, Robert Borden, and finally to make a recruitment office for men to sign up for war.

So let me break down our process to creating a stupendously fantastic exhibition. The first part of the plan was to create a Google Doc, on that document we identified the main people during the time and what their role was, those people came out to be;

Wilfred Laurier (played by Jackson)
Henri Bourassa (played by Gabi)
Robert Borden (Played by Stanfield)
Immigration Officer/Enrolment officer (played by Brianna)
Clifford Sifton (played by me)
After we picked our roles, the group briefly split up on our own to create scripts for the role we played as.

Then finally the hardest part and also the key part for the exhibition, was designing our backdrops, stupidly of me I didn’t take any pictures of the backdrops because when setting up for the exhibition everything was rushed and it turned into an absolute gong show. After it all quieted down and everything was set up, we had our costumes on and our lines rehearsed we were ready to start the exhibition. Let me give you a quick run down of how our section for the exhibition went. As people walked into the immigration office it was my job as Clifford sifton to greet all the immigrants (regular people who came to see the exhibition) and tell them a little bit about Canada’s new released bill called the Open Door Policy and that Canada is now welcoming immigrants with hardly any requirements. Then I would guide the lovely immigrants over to Brianna (who was the immigration officer) and she’d get them to sign a form “allowing” them into Canada.

(The immigration form the Audience signed)

After all the paper work was signed, I’d guide them one last time into the rally where Gabi played as Bourssa would be arguing with Laurier (Jackson), once they finished their argument stanfield or better known as Robert Borden would walk out to his podium and give a moving speech about Canadian identity.

(Robert Borden presenting his speech)

Finally the Audience would leave the rally into the enrolment office where Brianna would magically be there and once more she’d make them sign some forms but this time it was for war, then we’d shove them into trenches which was the next group.

(The enrolment office)

When the exhibition started people were lining up outside and all the hard work and preparation began to kick in, my group was like a well oiled machine, everything ran extremely smoothly, unfortunately the line didn’t end, people kept on coming out of nowhere and the exhibition was non stop for two and half hours but was well worth it.

To conclude this marvellous experience, the process of creating the exhibition took many hours of hard work and long nights after school but overall the finished product was amazing if I do say so myself. I learn a significant amount about how Canada was forged as a country and about their identity which is important to me as I am Canadian. All I can say is that it was well worth the hard work for experience is one to never forget and I hope Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes are proud of their PLP class.