One good way of gaining an understanding and appreciation for something, is to do it yourself. Become a gardener and youโll know a bunch of stuff about plants, and have a new appreciation for nature. Learn to sew and youโll understand how your clothes are put together, and value them a whole lot more. Create your own hypothetical political party and realize how much work must go into creating a real one, gain a new understanding of the Canadian government, and become a more educated citizen for things like future elections.
Of course the third option is what actually happened in my most recent project which asked, โHow should we govern ourselves?โ. There were a couple ways we attempted to answer this question, but Iโll start with the final product of this project: a campaign ad for a political party created by my group (Thomas, Angelo, Kaden, Noah, and me).
There were three things we needed to know to get to the point of the video:
– How we govern ourselves in Canada today
– Different political ideologies
– And how we think we should govern ourselves
Wait, how does the Canadian Government actually work?
With this project being called โThink you can do better?โ, whether I thought I could or not, I had to know what I was trying to โdo betterโ. In this case it was the structure of the Canadian Government (a complex topic which I knew less about than I thought I did) that I had to prove I understood before moving on. To do this, I made a post using writing processes to reflect on the federal election. I also began forming my personal opinions about the topics like voting and electoral systems, and revising my work to express that. I found it hard to form strong opinions about the topics at first, but when I knew more about them it was much easier. In the post I discussed how education about the government can increase voter turnout, but this knowledge would also help with the next steps of the project.
Political Ideologies
The next questions this project brought included what are political ideologies, the political spectrum, and where do my views fit into all of that? As I slowly started getting used to a new note taking system, I recorded some โzettelkastenโ notes on ideologies and the political spectrum. At this point however, I wasnโt very familiar with the system so I didnโt include some things that I would now, like my personal thoughts about the topics and connections to other things I was learning about.
Despite not recording this information the best I could, I did gain an understanding of the ideas and I was ready to apply my own identity to those. I did this by taking the vote compass quiz. This quiz placed me on the political spectrum, and then I could think about how those results related to my worldview, for example younger people like me tend to be more progressive. Then I applied these results to the next part of the project.
How should we govern ourselves?
The driving question โHow should we govern ourselvesโ is a question that many people try to answer, that each person has a different perspective on. Itโs difficult to answer, and as a teenager who only recently learned the meanings of terms like proportional representation and ideology, Iโm definitely not qualified to give the one true answer to this big question. However, throughout this project I collected bits and pieces of what I learned to contribute to my answer (in the back of my mind and in my notes).
For the final video, we formed our answer as a group with all the values, priorities, and details you saw in the video. That was a combination of all of our ideologies, and a very progressive group who wanted to focus on climate change is what I assume most people would expect when five grade 11 Seycove students form a party.
So that group answer contributed to my answer, as well as the opinions I developed from the election reflection and the press release. We should govern ourselves in a way that represents all Canadians. When creating our party I realized thatโs difficult in some ways since there are so many views and ideologies to be represented, but we should govern ourselves with Canadianโs values in mind because that is who the government is there for. Citizen participation is also part of how we should govern ourselves, itโs how these different views can be represented. And now that I have become a more educated citizen on the government, my views could be able to be more represented in the government by participation in the future.