The People’s Podcast

Spanning two months, our latest Humanities unit has just been capped off. Titled, “The People’s Podcast”, and centred around the topic of minorities in Canada, our job was to create a group podcast highlighting a specific minority in Canada. Prior to actually completing the podcast though, we had to learn more about what a minority is. 

To do this, we participated in class discussions and ultimately came up with some main minority groups that we could branch off of, such as religion, sexuality, etc. Our next step was to decide three minorities that interested us most, and write a paper explaining a bit about the history of the minority, why it interested us, and what ideas we have to incorporate in to our podcasts. This was our Minority Pitch Paper. After doing some research and brainstorming, I settled on Atheists, Black Canadians, and the LGBTQ community as my three minority groups. This was something I was a little worried to commit to as I know I’m not a very confident person when it comes to going out of my way to reach out and make connections in the community. In my paper I discussed some facts and issues regarding these minorities, as well as noting some of the possible ideas I have for the podcast itself. Here it is below if you would like to take a read.

Once completing our papers, Ms. Maxwell created five groups, who would all be completing a 15 – 20 minute podcast about their minority. My group consisted of Adlih, Isy and I and our minority was Sikhs in Canada. This was a little bit of a surprise to me as you can probably imagine as no where was anything even close to Sikhism mentioned on my Pitch Paper. But nonetheless, I was happy with the group and our topic. At that point, even though I had done research and put effort in to my Pitch Paper, I didn’t have a strong attachment to any of the minority groups I wrote about, so I was totally fine with Sikhism.

From here on out it was all about planning and creating the podcast, and following PLP fashion, we made a google doc and began the planning stages. We put all our research in to this document and slowly began to formulate a basic idea of how the podcast would go. Eventually we split up the script in to 3 main parts: Culture, History, and Being A Minority. Each of us completed a part of the script for one of these parts, me doing history. After creating a introduction and conclusion, we all recorded our parts, as well as the intro/conclusion. Adlih kindly volunteered to put everything together and edit our first draft. 

Included in this draft were two interviews. One with Ms. Bhangoo, a teacher at Seycove, and the other with Dr. Puran Singh Gill, who works for the Canadian Sikh Study and Teaching Society. For the interview with Ms. Bhangoo, we were recommended to speak to her by Ms. Maxwell who told us she grew up following the Sikh faith. We were very happy to have a Sikh connection so conveniently in the school so we set up a time to speak with her and record an interview. For the interview, we all sat down in the library, after school, and asked her some questions to which she had plenty to answer with. She was very kind and open with us, and we learned a lot about the Sikh religion and how it affects your life in both positive and negative ways. I’m really glad we were able to speak with her and get a really strong interview.

In terms of the interview with Mr. Singh Gill, I was unfortunately unable to participate as I had left a week early for my spring break vacation. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t get the opportunity to attend though. Adlih, Isy, Ms. Maxwell and Mrs. Parmar all went to the Akali Singh Sikh Society Gurdwara in Burnaby to speak with him. After talking to Adlih and Isy and seeing photos it seems like they had a great time and it was an amazing opportunity. I would have loved to go but regardless I’m happy that it turned out well and the interview was super insightful and in-depth.

After creating our first draft of the podcast, it was very clear what needed to be done next as we didn’t have music/sound effects and the audio quality wasn’t sufficient for what we wanted. So after hearing our critique and editing the script, we decided we wanted to record using the bigger, better mic. After consulting Mr. Hughes, we took the mic to an empty room in the school and recorded our podcast in more of a round table format where we all sat around the mic and talked. This was so much better than the way we did it the first time around. It made it much easier to edit and the sound quality was way better and a lot more consistent throughout the podcast. So far over the course of the project our teamwork and communication had been really good and it wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. Adlih offered to quickly create a simplistic GarageBand song that we could use throughout the podcast and after that our second draft was complete. There was a hugely noticeable difference from our first to second draft and as a group we were a lot more proud of ourselves.

At this point all that was left was to hear our second round of critique and make any changes or edits for our third and final draft of the podcast. For the final edit I took over from Adlih and made any final changes. There were a few things we had to fix that made things a bit tricky such as changing the name of the podcast which required us to re-record parts where we said the previous name. If we had more time we could have definitely sat down again and recorded the whole podcast so there wasn’t any change in mic quality as a result of the re-records I was talking about. 

Overall though I’m super happy with this whole project. I think our groups teamwork was phenomenal and for the most part the workload was split pretty evenly. There was no arguing at all and the only reason certain people did a bit more than others is because they volunteered, not at all because anybody was slacking. I think our podcast is strong and our interviews were integrated well to help support our claims and facts.

The last thing I want to talk about in this post is an in-class essay we completed, where we answered our driving question: How do our positions impact our experiences with literature. Now, I won’t say much because I put a lot of thought and effort in to the essay itself, so I suggest you read it. However I will say that writing this essay helped me with a few things. It helped me to better understand some of the ideas I have inside my head on a daily basis that I sometimes think about randomly. Its good to get to think about yourself and your own experiences once in a while and this was a great way for me to showcase my stance and thoughts on this topic. Also, these in-class essays are a great way to keep us up to standard on our writing skills. Personally I’m a big fan of writing, and I enjoy getting the chance to write and be critiqued on it. Anyways, I’d love if you gave it a read…