Gee Wiz, The 50’s Were Swell

The 1950s was a time of prosperity and growth in many different ways. At this time, people also strived to make everything perfect, it was so bad that it was
even an obsession. For example, there was the ideal nuclear family with the housewife, working father and kids. The housewife was expected to cook and clean all day and the father was expected to bring all the money home. Now if you’d like to hear more about society in the 50s, don’t hesitate to check out some of my previous weekly posts, such as the one on the movie Grease. 

Now in terms of our most recent project, it’s pretty clear that it’s about the 1950s. In fact, our driving question was “How has Canadian life developed after WWII?” This year, a local non-profit organization called the Deep Cove Heritage Society contacted our program to help them out with a few things such as conducting interviews for them. After we conducted those interviews (I did mine with Emily McGee and Julia Cree) we then assigned those interviewees to people in our class who could connect information from them to their podcast topics and to help answer our driving question. We were also assessed on two different competencies through the entirety of this project:

Discuss, Listen and Speak: Have I respectfully exchanged diverse ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking using appropriate speaking and listening skills for the context and purpose?

Continuity and Change: How are lives and conditions alike over time and how have they changed?

The third milestone we did in this project that I’d like to use as an example of my learning was our Keynote Presentation. In this milestone, we were to present to the class on a topic relating to our podcast topics. 

In the matters of the Discuss, Listen and Speak competency, I think I did well in some areas but not so much in others. I think that I showed good presentation skills and understood the content, so you could tell that I knew what I was talking about. However, I had a problem with constantly saying “things like that” at the end of my sentences and was a bit quiet. But, I did end up taking that feedback and applying it to the next time we did a presentation in front of the class for one of our stepping stones and improved a lot. 

Now for the Continuity and Change competency, I think that I excelled quite well in it and used very strong points for both continuity and change. For my presentation, I talked about how media has affected teenagers since the 50s. I used examples such as movies and film, like the movie “Rebel Without A Cause” is the first movie targeted at teens. I also talked about music and the impact Rock ‘n’ Roll had on them. For things that have remained the same, I talked about how media today still pushes unrealistic beauty standards. I also mentioned that television and music are still very much around today, but have just grown more.

For the fifth milestone we did (being our actual podcast episode), I was pretty happy with how it turned out. We took our interviews, knowledge and extra research on the 1950s relating to our topics to put together the final assignment in this project. 

For the Discuss, Listen and Speak competency, I think I showed it very well in this milestone. However, I also think that I had some areas to improve on. On one hand, I had a good understanding of the topic, you could tell I had done my research and the listeners were able to understand me because I was speaking at a good pace. I also made sure to add lots of context and make connections throughout my episode. But on the other hand, I kept worrying about audio issues because I could never seem to get my voice to sound the way I wanted no matter what I tried. This is one thing I would like to master if I were to make another episode. 

 As for the Continuity and Change competency, I think I nailed it pretty well. I approached this competency in a slightly more unique way than I usually do for my episodes, and decided to do even more interviews and focus on the continuity and changes in teenagers since the 50s in two different sides of Canada: British Columbia and Quebec. I also had a lot of good examples of change represented throughout my episode and mentioned things that had remained the same in my conclusion. An example of changes that I mentioned were the catholic school boards they had in the 50s, but are not around today. To talk about continuities in my conclusion, I said that teenagers today still spend time out with friends, still fall in love, still “rebel” and find themselves and what they want their place to be in the world.

Click bellow to see my progress throughout the making of my episode!

 

In my episode, I came to the conclusion that comparing a teenagers experience in Canada is not as simple as it seems, because there would be differences in different parts of this country, which was shown throughout the episode. In this project, it was also an interesting experience to hear about different parts of Canada in the 1950s. My original plan was to interview people who grew up in the 50s in several different provinces but I realized that it would make my episode way too long.

Finally, to answer the driving question for this project (How has Canadian life developed after WWII?), I would say it has developed drastically. The economy, quality of life and the overall face of Canada all faced major changes after WWII. I realized that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about the 50s until this project and how much this decade impacted the Canada we know today in so many different ways. Immigration, technology innovations, voting rights, workers rights and many more all improved in those years. However, the 1950s weren’t as perfect as they appeared on the outside, there were still issues such as discrimination, which we still know today.