Vancouver is the city that I have spent my whole life in and I absolutely love it here. The people, the views and the wildlife are some of the best in the whole world. However, I have never really bothered to learn about the history or the origins of Vancouver. Luckily for me our most recent unit that we have completed in Humanities was all about the emergence of Vancouver.
Like the WW1 unit this was something that I had a lot of fun learning about because it was something that I could really connect to and have fun doing work on. Or course for every unit we have two main parts for it. A driving question and a final project. Our driving question for this term was, “Through the emergence of Vancouver was the experience the same for everyone?” This was the question that we would answer throughout the unit, and of course our theme this year in podcasts so our final project was a podcast about labour rights in Vancouver. All this fit in together at some point during the unit and we did lots of work to show this.
One of the first things that we did this unit was visit the MOV (Museum of Vancouver). This was something that we did to help us understand more about the city that we live in. Before the trip we had been given several different topics that we would base our podcast around. Some of these topics were environmentalism, labour rights and city development. I am a worker myself so I was most interested in the topic of labour rights so when we went to the museum this was the part that I looked at the most.
At the museum there quite a few different parts to it, although they all had something to do with the history of Vancouver. In the labour rights part of the museum a lot of the exhibits had o do with Asian workers during the interwar period. There were all sorts of different photos and objects that had to do with the labour rights back then. This was something I spent a lot do tome looking at, and some of the things I found were very interesting. For example at one pint in Vancouver’s history Asian workers were being paid so little that they could not afford enough food to eat, so many people died of starvation. This was just one thing in the museum that made me really want to learn more about the labour rights issues in Vancouver.
After the museum visit we were assigned groups to do with the topic that we had been given. In my group was Sam, Kyle and Ryan and we were assigned the topic of labour rights. The first thing we did as a group was start to read a book called Nickel and Dimed. This was about a women who left her upper middle class life to work in only lower class minimum wage jobs.
We read the book for about 4 weeks and every week we had a check in and a group discussion of what we thought of the book and what happened during the section we just read. Unfortunately this book was absolutely horrible and was just a person complaining throughout the whole story. Although we did get a little bit of information about how hard it is for people that work in the lower class. This did give us a little bit of information that we would eventually use in our podcast.
The podcast was the final part of the unit and was the thing that we spent the most time on. The topic for this was of course labour rights. We had to relate labour rights during the interwar period to the labour rights now. This podcast really made us understand what we were talking about because we had to send the final copy to a person that we had interviewed for it.
I was really happy along with the rest of my group with how the podcast turned out and I really think it demonstrated our learning form the unit. We had to use different apps like Ferrite and we even had to make our own music to go along with the podcast. I really enjoyed this unit and I hope the that for the rest of the school year we will do a lot more like this.