In this post, the topic is my Alberta fields study and the project I had revolving around that. I’m going to talk about all the milestones and how it has helped me in completing my final product. I will also talk about what I’ve learned from talking to people in Alberta and learning about how place impacts who they are. We had 6 different milestones that we had to complete to finish the project. In the end, we had to create a video about our trip to Alberta and how we think Albertans are impacted by place. The first thing we did to start off the project was to look at the driving question.
The driving question for this project was “ How does place impact who we are?” This question was the start off the big project and was there for me to discuss, investigate, and answer. I also had to answer the question “How are Albertans impacted by place?” Before I get deeper into this, let me tell you about the steps I had to take to get to the final product.
Many milestone projects led up to the final project. The first milestone was about how a place impacted me. I made a mind map talking about the different parts of where I live that shaped my identity and worldview. After completing this, I learned from peer critique that everyone’s worldview/identity is completely different. No one has the same views on how the world has shaped them. This helped give me more insight on how I want to interview Albertans and what type of questions I should ask.
The next milestone was about looking at things through a lens. There were 4 different lenses (Political, Economical, Geographic, and Social) and each lens was a different way on how to views specific topics. For example, I may ask someone a more economical question to get a more financial view on a certain topic. We had to choose one of the four lenses, read an article, and write a paragraph about the parts to the story that fits with your lens. From doing this, I learned how each lens plays a significant role in breaking down the story. When you look at the article from every lens, it’s way easier to break up the article into the four lenses. If you want to read the article, you can access it by clicking the picture below.
After that, the next milestone was planning out interviews for our trip to Alberta. I choose two different lenses (Political and Economical) to base my research and questions on From this, learned that reading an article and using the same strategies from milestone 2, can help when it comes to making interview questions. If you have a lens, search up some article that has to do with that lens and answer questions like you would in milestone 2. This helps not only make better questions for the interviewers but better answers for yourself.
While we were in Alberta, we started a milestone called daily notes. Daily note was a concept where the teacher would give us a topic that has to do with what we were doing for that day and we would have to answer the topic question. Daily notes taught me not just one lesson, but many. Each question/topic was different and required different methods to answer. Some of them we had to ask other strangers for information and others we had to do our research. Below you can see some of the daily notes I completed in Alberta.
Finally, I started creating my video on Alberta and how the people there are affected by place. I started it in iMovie with some photos from Alberta. From there I went on to adding in interview clips, voice-overs, and title sequences. It ended up being good but not the best it could be. I then made some revisions base on peer critique and was able to fix a few things that were essential to the final product.
In the end, I was able to answer how Albertans are impacted by place in my thesis. To get to that answer, I had to look back at all the different interviews I did in Alberta and use these resources to answer the question. My thesis ended up being “Albertans are impacted by place politically and economically because with the natural resources that Alberta has, they can use them to boost their economy which shapes more right-wing political views, giving them more independence and freedom as a province.” Below you can watch the final milestone for this project.
Reflecting on everything, I think this was a great learning experience. Not only did we get to learn about the place, but we got to go hands-on and dive deeper into our learning about Alberta. Being there really helped me answer the driving question and my thesis. Even completing each milestone has taught me a lot about interview skills, interpretation skills, and more. From doing this project I have learned more about the different groups of people in the world and how they’re affected by where they live. Anyways, this is the end of the post. I hope you enjoyed this post, there will be another one coming soon. 👋
