One Of The Greats

Hey guys, if you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while you probably know that I have a specific way of writing them, a signature if you will. But today I’ve decided to change it up a bit and add a few text features to my post about our recently finished project ‘The Greatest Canadian’. The driving question for this project was, to no ones surprise,

Who is the Greatest Canadian?

It was our job to find a Canadian from 1982 and onwards who was significant within the context of our podcast theme as well as Canadian Identity and argue for their significance in our first ever episode of our podcast. So sit back, relax, and get ready to hear about the research that haunts my dreams.

The first challenge of this project was to find a Canadian that is connected to the evolution of dance as a whole from the last 38 years who also has had a significant effect on Canadian Identity. And as you can imagine it was pretty hard, but like the great parent she is my mom came to the rescue and told me about this one Native Dancer that she had heard of who was apparently pretty famous on TikTok and had also been on So You Think You Can Dance during it’s first season, his name was James Jones. However, before I could truly settle on him being the person I would talk about, I had to research him first and established his historical significance. Which, funnily enough, is one of our competencies for this project:

Establish Historical Significance.

Even though this was still at the beginning of the project I have to say this was where I learned the most. Before this, I had never really done heavy duty research especially of such a narrow topic so when I had to look through multiple sources, I probably went to around 30 different web pages, to get a tiny piece of info that I needed to craft the argument for James’ significance, it was a real learning experience for me. I ended up working on my use of the competency:

Empowered Learner

Within this research since I was going through so many different pages and had to figure out a way to keep track which sites I wanted to use and which gave basically no info. To do that I had about ten different tabs open with the sites that were extremely important and had a lot of info and bookmarked the ones that were helpful but not needed, allowing quick access to all the sites that I needed. It’s a system that I’m totally going to keep using in the future.

This was also where I worked on my use of the other competency:

Comprehending Text.

Like I said before, I had never done this amount of research so when I was looking through these different sources it took me a bit to figure out what information was truly relevant to his significance and what was just a cool fact about him. When writing my first drafts of the script for the podcast episode I actually ended up spending a lot of my time just going through them and weeding out the info that just didn’t fit the narrative I was setting up for the episode. And like I said, these earlier parts of the project were where I really improved as a learner, because they were the planning stage of the episode I was pushed to really think about what I was talking about. Did that sometimes lead me to have 30 minute debates in my head wether or not James Jones was truly historically significant? Yes, multiple times in fact, but because of that I ended up coming up with more points and reason that argued for his significance, wether they fell into the category of quantity, importance, or even relevance.

Finally it was time to make our podcast episodes and I have to say, I think mine turned out pretty well. You can find the basecamp post with the info and actual episode here, or you can just listen to the episode right now down below.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cdduhiuMZ4cD4RtZbhGGf?si=ilCefCy3S5-AxPnByNHLww

In the end I think I can confidently answer the Driving Question of this project: Who is the Greatest Canadian? That person is none other than James Jones but it’s not my answer that truly matters here. No, it’s wether or not I can convince you to answer the same and I do hope I have succeeded.