✰𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦✰

Bonjour friends. After an amazing month of creating a video project about how place impacts people, I am here to tell you all about my experience. This was our first big project of the year and it was also special because it went with this year’s field school! Our class went on a incredible journey through the Rockies on a mission to answer our driving question, how does place impact who we are? Clearly this is no simple question, so the project began with focusing this question on a specific group of people. There were many choices and in the end I was happy to focus on artists. I then was able to switch my question from “how does place impact people”, to “how does place impact artists”. We needed to be prepared, so we created a plan before we left on our trip. I outlined a plan for my video specifically and how I would execute filming it based off of different locations we were going to and who I would interview there. It was really good to have this plan and I came back to it often as I worked on the project. It also gave me a good idea of what to expect during the project even though plans can change.

Pre Trip Research

Speaking of change, a change in location was about to happen for the PLP class of grade nine. It was time to leave our school and head off on our adventure. And now that we were travelling to places such as the ones described in my pre-trip plan I was ready to start filming. The first person I got to interview was Peter Exner, an employee at the super cool Studio Bell which is a music museum in the heart of Calgary Alberta. I’m going to be honest, the thought of interviewing someone was a bit intimidating at first but in the end the interview worked out quite well and it helped me know what to expect during the next ones. The things things I learned from that interview was that one, always have the exact questions you want to ask ready before the interview and two, don’t ask too many questions because most of the time people have a lot to say and you don’t have a lot of time. Thanks to Peter we were equipped with interviewing experience and we were well prepared for our next two which are in my final video.

One assignment we had for this project was Daily Note. At the end of each long day we would spend some time answering questions somewhat related to activities of that day. This was a great way to think about the driving question from a different perspective but also to simply review the stuff we learned and check in with ourselves about how our projects were going.I did a lot of thinking during daily note, often it would be the time I really thought about how what I learned connected to our driving question. As I sat there thinking during the last few days of our trip I realized how everything we learned could connect with at least one other thing we learned. Identity, culture, community, place, and people was a reoccurring subject. Daily note really helped me with the final video. Oh did I just say final video!?

I’m quite proud of my final video. It was an awesome way to show how I answered the driving question. I learned so much from this project, where do I even start? I learned a lot about identity and culture, like how culture is made up of different aspects such as history, religion, art, and language. Identity was super important to understand for this project. Identity is culture, worldview, personality, behaviour, and genealogy. The reason it’s so important to understand identity is because in our driving question (how does place impact who we are?) the who we are part is identity! I also learned about continuity and change. I learned that continuity and change can have to do with place or time. Something can change or stay the same for two different places but also for place in time. Like I said earlier I learned a lot about how to conduct an interview but also how to use information from an interview to answer a question. It was really interesting to see how place impacts artists. I now understand the power of place and even how it impacts me thanks to this project.

See ya in the next post

-Asha 🌊