Hello, Internet. Merry December. The classroom is full of fairy lights and poinsettias, students are wandering the halls in Santa hats and festive jumpers, and everyone’s getting ready for the Winter Exhibition.

However, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about
Social Studies. More specifically, it’s about a socials project we’ve been working on concerning social justice throughout the history of Vancouver.

 

For this project, we were split into groups based on the specific topics we were interested in, and asked to create a podcast about our topic, and how it affected Vancouver, in the interwar years and now. My group’s topic was Aboriginal Rights.  Specifically, we focussed on two things: Residential Schools, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

 

In order to get some firsthand information on residential schools and First Nations rights, we interviewed Joy Fontaine-Cramer over the phone. She gave us an insight into the lives of her parents growing up, and her job now. We had to cut down her interview in order to integrate it into our podcast properly, but listening to all of what she had to say was very interesting, and I wish we could have kept more of it in.

 

Our final project ended up going on SoundCloud, and we’ve sent it to Joy Fontaine-Cramer in the hopes that she can listen to it,

 

Now that we’ve finished the podcast part of our project, we’re working on writing essays that we’ll eventually amalgamate into a letter to send to Terry Beech. Each letter must address a problem related to our subject, and suggest a way to help solve that problem. For my group, we’re addressing the problem of stereotypes surrounding aboriginal peoples, with the suggestion to add discussion about these stereotypes into the BC curriculum in order to dispel them in the future.

 

Toodles!