The Waltz of WWII

Hey guys, for the last few months us students in PLP 10 have been working on creating and publishing our very own podcasts. They could be about anything we wanted as long as the focus didn’t become too specific and I decided I wanted to make mine about the history of dance and different events that helped shape dance into what it is today. Well to my gleeful surprise, that idea of events in history that had consequences on our lives today was exactly what we would be focusing on in our new project surrounding WWII. The driving question for the project in question was:

How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?

To me this was shaping up to be the perfect project but boy was I wrong.

https://open.spotify.com/show/4QGCET0cjsBEbkw2WAz9TK?si=6Xqb6GxHRkeri01efcUwlA

Unlike our last project/episode where we had to find an interview that would help support the point being made within the episode. (You can read the post about that project here.) This project we would be basing our whole episode around a story from around the time of WWII that we would have to extract out of a personal interview we conducted ourselves. This is where the first curricular competency comes in: Global Collaborator. It was our job to find someone from around the world that had either a personal story/experience from WWII or someone who had a story that somehow connected to WWII in one way or another. This is the part of the project that I honestly did the worst at in terms of using the competency and critical thinking. You see, when we had been told the topic for the episode my mind had gone into overdrive trying to figure out what I would focus on in my episode, not taking into account that I was supposed to be letting the story I had found guide the rest of the creative process. So it’s probably no surprise when I began to have a bit of trouble finding someone that could tell a story that fit into my predetermined narrative. However, as with many times during these projects where I myself cannot find a way forward my mother talked some sense into me and got me to call both sets of grandparents since it didn’t hurt to see if they would have some info that surrounded dance during the time period we were looking at.

To my delight, my Grandma on my mom’s side actually had a fairly interesting story of her parents spanning from before the war was even an inkling in European people’s minds to well into the 1990’s. With this new direction to the endless swirling of thoughts and ideas in my head I was finally able to start research and bring this story to the rest of the world. This also brings us to the next two curricular competencies: Analyze Cause and Consequences and Using Evidence and Resources. The thing about this step in the project was that I used it as a bit of a planning phase as well for what I would be putting into my episode, specifically for what causes and consequences I would be focusing on that related to my Grandma’s story. When I started off my research I didn’t have too much direction with what I wanted to talk about which in hind sight probably made this process a whole lot slower. However, there were two things that ended up helping me get my research on track. The first was when I found a blog post that focused on the boom of popularity of dance halls after the First World War. Thanks to that find I finally had a proper generalized idea of where I wanted to go with this episode and what I should focus on in my research. The second was during my research of dance halls and what brought their popularity within England’s population. I was still looking for a cause or consequence that connected to WWII and had found some interesting info that talked about the creation of the so-called english style. I won’t get into specifics since I talk more about it in my actual episode but in terms of using curricular competencies I used the evidence that I had been given by this piece of text (yet another competency!) and connected it to the the reading we had done earlier in the project about the rise of nationalism in Europe and how that was an underlying cause of WWII.

To put it into more technical terms, I improved my use of three of the four competencies in this project just from this one step alone. Kind of similar to the first project actually. By using the evidence and resources that I had found myself as well as gotten from previous milestones I was able to use the Responding to Text competency to relate what I had read in these sources to both each other as well as the story I was to be telling in this episode. Finally being able to find the causes and consequences of WWII on dance using these competencies.

However, if there was one thing that I would take away from this project, it would have to do with how I set up my episode. The thing I had the most problem with during this project was mostly during the planning phase mainly due to the fact that I would start to plan what my conclusion would be or how the story would play out before I had done the proper research. Which ended up with me spending valuable time trying to find evidence that supported my unfounded conclusion when I should of just be looking for the facts to base that conclusion on. So when I begin to create my next episode I will make sure that whatever I decide to focus on I will work to use the the evidence that I find to create my conclusion, not the other way around. Finally, as we do at the end of every project my answer to the driving question:

How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?

By using these stories from people who lived before, during, or after the war we can see the true impacts that WWII had on people instead of just a number. Allowing us to connect this tragedy to our lives today, hopefully allowing this long peace to continue throughout our lifetime.