Its never a good feeling when the night before the exhibition your saying to yourself, “wow, out of all the exhibitions I’ve done, this is the one I’m least proud of.”

The week before the spring exhibition 2023 was a crazy one. Preparing for an exhibition is always time consuming, and by grade 11 I have many other classes that are starting to take up the rest of my time. In between studying for all my other school classes, I would be working on posters that I had planned to present at the exhibition. Right from the start I wasn’t 100% feeling confident about the posters. From when I pitched it in class, to all the time I spent working on them. 

Our project was focused around the question, How might we transform education systems to create engaged and informed citizens?

My original idea to answer this, was just going to be based on talking to people. This was something I find I’m good at, so I wanted to utilize my communication skills during this project. The idea was that I was going to go around and interview a variety of students, and speak to them abut what they would change in schools. I was really interested in focusing on the engagement piece of answering this question. A common theme through a lot of my projects over the years has been human connection, engagement, and feelings. So I wasn’t to shocked when I found myself being drawn to this type of project/answer. 

My one issue with this idea was that I didn’t know how I wanted to present it in a physical form. I thought about a podcast, but realistically I didn’t have the time to create a good version that was exhibition worthy. So I kept trying to come up with new ideas, and this was the first point where I felt stuck in the exhibition creation process. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I could create posters based off of what I heard in these interviews, so I stuck with that and continued forward.

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I actually learned a lot of interesting things during my interviews, but something that really stuck out to me was the way people react to the phrasing of a question. In my earlier interviews I would ask the subject, “what would you change about school?” I found I would have a decent amount of hesitation from the subject. They often wouldn’t want to talk about school or just didn’t have any ideas. After a few interviews going like this, I decided I needed to change it up a little to see if I could get more honest reactions. Next time I went up to people I started phrasing the question like this, “what do you not like about school? what would you change?” When I asked them the question like this, I found students had way more things to say and were even eager to engage and speak about what they think. 

Even something small like this shows you that we are not reaching so many students because of something so simple, the way we communicate with them!

This is exactly what I wanted my project to focus on, I just hadn’t quite figured it out yet. So as I finished up my interviews I started creating these posters. The idea at the time was to create different posters targeted at different audiences. Already I felt I was struggling, I just wasn’t proud or happy with what I was creating. This was the second time I felt stuck during the exhibition project, but I had to keep pushing forward because the exhibition was only in a couple days.

Now, its the night before the exhibition and all I’m thinking to myself is how disappointed I am in my project. I just knew it wasn’t all that I could do! So I went over some of the feedback I had received on my project, and some of it was about reaching my target audience. What is the most effective way to reach my target audience (teenagers)? Social media of course! So I went with that, and that night I created an instagram. It was meant to be a theoretical space where students could send in their opinion about what they would change in school. They could also listen to what others would change, as that is where I posted and displayed the interviews I had conducted. 

We had finally made it to the night of the exhibition and I had a product with me that I wasn’t completely upset about, some might even say I was a little proud. As was nearing 5:30pm and the doors were about to open, disaster struck. As it always seems to do on exhibition evenings. There was a typo in every single one of my posts on the instagram account!! I stood there debating wether I should just not present the instagram account, as I still had the posers and they were already pinned up behind me. I couldn’t do that though, as it was the one thing I felt brought my presentation to an acceptable grade 11 level. So I sat down, and changed all the mistakes as fast as I could before people arrived. If I’m being honest, its the fastest I’ve ever got work done. And by the time people were arriving, the instagram account was up and running with as far as I know, no typos!

My plan for my pitch at the exhibition was to present both the posters and the instagram account that I created. And that is exactly what I did, for the first few presentations. As the night went on, I found I was just presenting the instagram account because it tied into the focus of my project and the point I was trying to get across. Overall this exhibition had a lot of up and downs (like they usually do) but I learned that it can really pay off to push through when you feel stuck. I ended up with a project that I could feel confident about presenting, even if there were a few bumps along the way.