As always, Brooke.

Hello all, Welcome to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about a project called “A Case for a Nation”. This project was about Nationalism and the ripple affect that comes along with it. We did most of our whole class learning on Nationalism in Canada, but some people later picked different cases of nationalism to research.

Driving Question

“How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?”

I think that the best answer to this question would be the caption that my group came up with for our instagram post (this will make more sense later on in the post).

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.”

In the last few sentences of that paragraph, it links the two timelines together by showing the connection of French Canadian nationalism to present day, which is exactly what the driving question is asking.

Current Events

After briefly looking into the concept of nationalism, we worked on an assignment to understand nationalism in todays world, thus revealing the “Current Events Presentation”. For this, we researched a relatively current event that was happening around the world that could relate to Identity and Nationalism. We than made a document with some images, sources and facts. We than presented our documents to a small group of people through the first portion of the project. I did my presentation on the boil water advisory crisis affecting First Nations communities across the country. This little exercise helped me practice my research skills/presentation creating and was a start into identifying nationalism.

Building Knowledge

Before we split into our final groups for the project, we needed to form bit of a backstory as to where we are in history. We learned about the formation of Upper and Lower Canada, the Canadian Confederation, and cases of nationalism across the world. We did a few different knowledge-building activities to dive into each of those three topics. First, we started to learn about nationalism as a concept across the globe. We read printed out pages from a textbook that discussed different places and their struggles with nationalism, and conferred with our groups to take notes and discuss. Then, we learned about Upper and Lower Canada. We did a pseudo-simulation called the “Rebellion Scene Investigation”, taking us back to the two colonies to explore their differences and learn about the people who lived in the majority French vs majority English parts of Canada. This part of the project helped us practise taking historical perspective of life back then to learn why they may have acted certain ways or made certain decisions.

The Product

Finally, we split into groups of 3 based on which topic we chose, but I accidentally picked a group who already had three people so we became the only group of 4. There were many topics to chose from and the topic we chose was “Quebecois / French Nationalism in Canada”. I chose this topic because I felt like I had enough prior knowledge to do a good job at executing the work that would coincide with it. Plus I think that it is important to learn about the French existence in Canada because it is a big part of how our country was formed. 

The finial product of this project was an Instagram post. We had to create 3 images with our group that would be the images displayed in the post. So to start off with, we individually had to create 3 images. One had to be a image digitally drawn on, another had to be a quote, and the last one was a choice. My first three images were as follows ; 

The people in my group also created 3 images, Declan, Faith, and Zach. We picked in class one image from everyone to make a compilation that we think best showed French Nationalism in Canada.

Next, we worked on the caption. We looked at our topic and thought about the story behind it. We used different strategies like the “story spine” and started to condense the years of change and nationalism into just the most important points.  Again we first created a caption individually and then later would combine ours with our group. Here was mine; 

“French Canadian nationalism has been prominent in Canada since upper and lower Canada were formed way back in 1791. From Politics and economics to social ramifications, French Canadians have a history of being oppressed by British rule in the formation of the country that we now call Canada. Citizens had to fight long and hard for French representation in their government systems even in areas where it was a 95% majority of French Canadians. Modern day Quebec even has political parties that are calling for Quebec to separate from Canada and become its own independent nation.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory” 

We then sat down as a group and looked at all of our captions in a shared pages document. We highlighted what we liked and wanted to keep on each others captions and then glued them together to create one final masterpiece. Here is my groups final caption;

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory #francophone 

@that_snail_kid @declan.rattray @zachv24 and Faith”

Conclusion

Overall, I think this project was rather enjoyable. I learned much more depth into the formation of Canada, and the impact that French Canadian history has on Canada today. I also gained a lot of skills on how to write your opinion and support it with all the stuff it needs to make your writing effective.

Here you can check out the instagram account that the whole classes posts will be up on soon. Hopefully you will go quickly check those out and drop a few likes :D.

Historical perspectives instagram account!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.