My Honest Re(concili)action
What’s up internet people and welcome back to my blog. This is a very special blog post because not only is it an exhibition post, not only is this my first exhibition of grade 11, IT’S MY TENTH EXHIBITION 🎉🎉🎉🎊🎊🎊 So happy exhibtioversary everybody, I have made it to the double digits. With that being said they still aren’t easy and the fact that this time our whole theme was BC First Peoples made it new and scary I think this might have been my best looking exhibition yet. Now with that in mind let’s get started.
The name of this project was ReconciliACTION and the whole topic was about, you guessed it, reconciliation. The driving question for this project was “How might we engage in meaningful Reconciliation?” This question isn’t something that has a definitive answer, so instead of coming back to it at the end of this post, the answer will be showcased through my learning in this project.
In order to start this project we need to first actually define reconciliation. I’m sure we’ve all heard this word before, and we know what it means, but when we try to define it we struggle and find that most people give a similar answer but there is variation. Through this project, we found out that reconciliation is a word that means something different to everyone. Being from England I hadn’t really heard this word before moving here, and so I felt like everyone had a head start in this course, but slowly I’m realizing that I’m figuring out my own definition at my own pace which is important and central to what reconciliation means to me.
Because in the past our teachers have waited too long to tell us our exhibition projects and we have been super panicked on the day of, we were told what our project was, what our topics were and who was in our group almost immediately, I and everyone else in the class really appreciated this because we knew what we had to eventually do and we could plan ahead accordingly with 2 months of advance. The final product of this project would be our whole class diving into 8 different groups, each dedicated to reconciliation efforts being made in Canada, and we essentially had free reign and complete control over what we did to explain our topic to the public. My topic ended up being Indigenous language revitalization which I was interested in because I had heard some things about the indigenous peoples having tons of languages and I wanted to know the history behind them and how they were being brought back from death after getting lost in residential schools.
Although we knew our end product in advance, we decided to hold off on starting on it immediately because we first had to expand our knowledge of reconciliation as a whole so we could understand how our topic showed reconciliation. We first decided to talk about why reconciliation actually matters. We learned this by doing many activities such as talking about what we already knew before this project, learning about why residential schools were made, learning about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and seeing why reconciliation matters to indigenous peoples today.
To further our research we went in-depth on what is and what isn’t reconciliation. This was important because we needed to understand what parts of our topic to include and be able to tell the difference between reconciliation and general apologies. At this point, we had moved into working with our final groups and we were given an assignment to all separately gather 5 different sources that backed up research we had done about reconciliation attempts being made In Canada. Using this research we all came to a decision of what is and isn’t considered reconciliation in our topic (language revitalization).
After completing our research we began to actually start working on our actual product. We first were told that we would have to have some kind of interactive element, typical PLP, and we had some class discussions about how to actually engage our audience so they didn’t just come in and see their kid and leave. We had to get them to actually care about our topic first and then we could teach them about how they can reconcile. Some of the suggestions were making a game they could play, having something they could add to at the exhibition and over time it would grow, or making something they could take away with them, my group decided we would make a game.
Now we could actually start working on our project but before we had complete control we had to pitch our design to our teacher with a drawing and a keynote presentation. We worked together as a group and came up with some really solid ideas.
This was our initial design for our station, however it would receive changes in the future. Our interactive element would be a memory game, where we had 5 language names and 5 common greetings in each of those languages, then would give the contestants a cheat sheet that contained a ton of languages and their common greetings, but they would only get to keep it for 15 seconds, they would then have to match the cards with the right languages and words. We also had a listening station where there was a website set up called BC First Voices that teaches you how to speak indigenous languages by giving you a catalog of languages to pick from that you could learn the alphabet of and search for translations of words or phrases. It’s a great website that you can use, find it here [https://www.firstvoices.com/languages](https://www.firstvoices.com/languages). We also decided to serve mint tea to the guests, now I know you might be thinking “How on earth does that relate to your topic”, that is a great question…. I don’t really know, but my group mate Susan had a whole story behind it that involved her and her mum at a camp finding mint tea leaves and making tea for everyone so we rolled with it. We also had a sign that said hello in English and then below had hello in many indigenous languages. Another thing we added was a map of BC that showed where all the languages in BC came from. At first, we were going to have a timeline that showed the evolution of languages in BC, however, we scrapped this idea because we all realized it didn’t really fit and none of us knew how to do it well. That’s pretty much everything we had planned, so now we just had to actually make it.
Everything was going super smoothly, we had a lot of time, and everyone had their individual roles, there was a slight scare when I ran out of my ADHD medication and couldn’t refill it but we got over it and everything was perfectly fine. Until it wasn’t. One of my group mates was supposed to draw the map, but then around 10 days before the exhibition, he got pneumonia. This was a huge panic for our group because none of us were artistically skilled. We had a 2-day freakout but then our teacher said we could use her map of exactly what we wanted to do, this was perfect so we were relieved, but then 2 days went by and there was no map. I went to ask my teacher about it and she said she had lost the map! Now we were in panic mode but luckily we had the design digitally so Susan locked in and drew the whole thing by herself and it looked great.
Exhibition day came around and we were so….. actually prepared? We all knew what we had to do and we just had to set things up because we had finished all the work in the days before. After a few minor hiccups hanging up the sign, we were done with our station around 20 minutes early. So with nothing to do, we just hung out and prepared for visitors. Here is what our final product ended up looking like.
I think it is the best-looking exhibition I’ve had to date. Huge shout out to to my group members Susan, Sofia and Jasper for being so awesome throughout this project.
Like I said I won’t be ending this post with a driving question answer but I will give you what I found out reconciliation means to me. To me, reconciliation is working together to make up for past wrongdoings and moving towards a better more equal future.
Thank you for reading my blog post, sorry there weren’t too many pictures but I hope you enjoyed, and maybe you learned something while you were here. See yaaaa!