Hello, Internet.

(This is supposed to be a gif but there’s a good chance it’s frozen and is now just a picture of some curtains. Anyway– hi.)

So, I recently co-created a video about Canada’s racist past (and present). It followed the thesis that Canada was painted as a hero in the civil rights movement, but it actually had its own racism happening, which we don’t learn about as much as America. 

Although this video focussed on Canadian history, the unit that it related back to was actually about the African-American civil rights movement, which we’ve been studying in socials for a couple months now. We started out learning about the murder of Emmett Till, and chronologically worked our way through the major events of the movement up until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

We also did a series of “Socratic seminars” for this unit, based around first the novel Dear Martin, and then around two films: one about the freedom riders, and Selma, a movie about (surprise, surprise) the Selma marches. In these seminars, half the class would sit in a circle and have an in-depth discussion about the central themes and ideas of whatever piece of media we were looking at, and the other half would sit in a slightly bigger circle with one person sitting behind each person in the discussion, taking notes on how much they said, how many questions they asked how well they were participating, and how much they were listening (a non-stressful learning environment if I ever saw one). When we first started doing these seminars, we took a while to get the hang of looking deeper than just the basic text we were examining and actually getting to the themes or larger issues at hand, but as we did more seminars and learned more about the topics we were discussing, we eventually started having better discussions.

We had a small assignment within this unit where we had to write a blog post relating some issue from the civil rights movement to today. I chose to talk about the history of people stereotyping black men as “angry” or “dangerous”.

Our large driving question for this unit was “How Can An Individual Change a System?” There are several clear examples within the civil rights movement of individuals who fought to change the system– MLK is the one who immediately comes to mind, but other examples include Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, JFK, or Diane Nash, among others. However, we were also given an assignment that would answer the question using individuals outside of the Civil Rights movement: Pick a Canadian activist, and explain how they as an individual changed the system.

I started looking into Canadians connected to various civil rights initiatives. The Canadian I eventually settled on researching was Kenneth Zeller. Zeller wasn’t exactly an activist, but more along the lines of what Emmett Till was to the African American civil rights movement– someone whose death incited activism among those who outlived him. Zeller’s story is a disturbing, but unfortunately not uncommon, one: he was a teacher living in Toronto who was beaten to death by five teenage boys for being gay. While the killers were all eventually convicted and sent to prison, they faced only reduced manslaughter charges rather than second degree murder. In the wake of Zeller’s murder, the Toronto school board introduced the Triangle Program, an alternative class for LGBTQ+ students who were being harassed or felt otherwise unsafe attending regular school. This was one of the first programs in Canada to address the issue of LGBTQ+ students being harassed or attacked, and was ground breaking at the time it was created.

I didn’t actually end up doing a project on Kenneth Zeller, however, because before I could make any headway on that project, our main assignment was changed: Instead of researching a Canadian activist, we would work with a partner to come up with our own driving question to answer alongside our main driving question in a video that connected Canada, historical perspective, and contemporary issues. From there, we came up with the idea for the video we eventually created: a look into Canada’s dark past, and why we’re typically seen as so sympathetic.

In order to reflect on what we learned from this project and prepare to write blog posts about it, we were given one final task: fill out a spreadsheet and answer some questions about what you learned from this project, and what you want to take away from it.

(Click the image to read it)

The main thing I took away from this project is that it’s important to think critically about information, and actively make an effort to educate yourself and seek out the most accurate and unbiased information. Moving forward, I want to make more of an effort to educate myself about both parts of history that might be glossed over or whitewashed, and current events that I might be getting a biased report of or not getting a lot of information about. I’m glad I did this project, because it made me reconsider the way that I, and other people, look at the country I live in, and the world around me as a whole.

 

Toodles.